This is Not a Newsletter About The Giller Prize

 
 

By sTACY LEE KONG

2021 Giller Prize winner Omar El Akkad. Image: Scotiabank Giller Prize

 
 

Content warning: this newsletter contains mentions of death, violence and torture. Links may contain graphic images.

A note on language: As I’ve mentioned in every newsletter I’ve written about Gaza since Oct. 7, it’s super important that we take care with our language when discussing Israel and Palestine, because the way we talk about this situation has real consequences for real people. So to be clear, when I critique the Israeli government and military, I am not critiquing all Israelis, much less all Jewish people. I also think it’s important to push back on attempts to characterize critique of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as antisemitic. Furthermore, it is disingenuous and actually dangerous to conflate Zionism with Judaism, as this list of prominent Jewish writers has argued. Lastly, when I use the words colonization, genocide, apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing to describe Israel’s actions, that’s based on the analysis of organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the International Federation for Human Rights, the United Nations, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace as well as academics who study genocide and South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice to bring genocide charges against Israel. It is also based on the language Israeli officials and public figures have used themselves, 500+ instances of which have already been collected by Law for Palestine.

Okay, this is sort of a newsletter about the Giller Prize. But really, it’s a newsletter about what it means to live in the west at this moment, and the fundamental tension between people who want to return to ‘normal,’ and people who know that is just… impossible. But to get there, we have to start by talking about the Giller Prize.

For those who don’t know, the Gillers are Canada’s most prestigious and richest literary prize. Founded in 1994 by businessman Jack Rabinovitch in honour of his late wife, Doris Giller, it awards $100,000 to one winner every November, plus $10,000 prizes for each of the finalists who made its annual shortlist. (For comparison, the other two big lit prizes in Canada are the $60,000 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Awards, which each come with a $25,000 prize.) But the Gillers aren’t just important because of the money; there’s also the prestige. As a 2105 profile of that year’s winner, André Alexis, explained, winning the Giller inevitably leads to a spike in book sales, readership and public profile. Put another way by Egyptian-Canadian author and 2021 winner Omar El Akkad on CBC’s Commotion this week, winning the award is career-making.

“Winning the Giller changed my life in every way possible,” El Akkad says. “The money was the least of it; most of the money is still sitting in the bank. In fact, the most of that money that I have spent is taxes on that money, because I'm a dual citizen and the U.S. charges taxes on prize money whereas Canada doesn't. Having the money… sitting there in a bank account is a kind of stability, of course. But the ways in which it did change my life were first of all, my career. I had this book that nobody cared about and then suddenly everybody cared about it. Also, it gave me a kind of confidence and everything that you would expect from winning an award of that magnitude.”

So, it’s notable that he and 30 other authors would cut ties with the Gillers in protest over its title sponsor, the Bank of Nova Scotia, and other funders—including the Azrieli Foundation, Indigo and Audible—that are “directly invested in Israel’s occupation and genocide in Palestine,” a decision that he really thoughtfully discusses on the episode. (You should definitely listen.)

What’s the problem with Scotiabank?

The issue at hand is Scotiabank’s continued investment in Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer that has been the target of global calls for divestment. According to an open letter signed by 34 authors, including El Akkad, last year’s winner, Sarah Bernstein, as well as Catherine Hernandez, Farzana Doctor and David Bergen, among others, the authors “cannot abide [their] work being used to provide cover for sponsors actively investing in arms funding and Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians. [They] cannot abide the Giller Foundation’s attitude to Palestine solidarity since November 2023: the criminalization of protest, and the silencing and discrediting of their own authors who have stood in solidarity with community organizers and Palestinians.” Separately, two judges have also stepped down from the Gillers’ jury: Ethiopian-American author Dinaw Mengestu and Indian novelist Megha Majumdar.

Scotiabank has been the subject of protest over this investment for years, but the Gillers became part of this conversation in November 2023, when protesters interrupted host Rick Mercer at that year’s ceremony. According to a Walrus article about how the prize became associated with genocide, “Giller organizers berated police into charging the protesters.” The next day, the organization’s executive director Elana Rabinovitch told the Globe and Mail the protest showed “disrespect to Canadian authors and their literary achievements” and that “organizers are working with local law enforcement authorities,” though this was removed from the article at some point. (Rabinovitch also later told The Walrus that Giller staff had actually not collaborated with police.) At the time, more than 1,800 Canadian writers and publishers signed an open letter expressing support for the protesters and calling for the police to drop the charges against them. And behind the scenes, this protest kicked off serious conversations about how the prize could be funded without Scotiabank, with one idea being an author-funded prize. According to El Akkad, there did seem to be the sense, for a moment at least, that the Gillers would break with the bank. And on July 2, Rabinovitch gave a statement to the Globe supporting that perception, or at least indicating the Gillers were thinking seriously about how to move forward, saying, “we have been working hard for some time now on a solution that will support the foundation, the prize and all authors, which will be shared publicly shortly,” and asking “that people not construe our silence for endorsement of the status quo. Systems take time to dismantle.”

However, last week, the organization announced it would maintain its relationship with Scotiabank, with Rabinovitch saying, “while we respect all viewpoints that have been shared, we are confident in the integrity of Scotiabank and in our partnership. And while we appreciate the range of views that have been shared, the foundation is not a political tool.”

There’s a lot to explore about the ways institutions perceive upholding the status quo as apolitical, but there’s a limit to how many words even I will write in a single newsletter, so for now, let’s just talk about why Scotiabank’s investment in Elbit is so problematic. There are two reasons: first, any investment in this company is morally suspect, as its “weapons are routinely used in war crimes against Palestinian civilians and its surveillance systems are used in Palestine and along the U.S.–Mexico border,” per Investigate, an American Friends Service Committee project that highlights corporations that are involved in, or profit from, state violence. What’s more, “Elbit manufactures several weapons that are largely banned—or considered particularly ‘controversial’—under the laws of war [including] cluster munitions, weaponized white phosphorus, and flechette projectiles.” (Elbit denies that it makes cluster munitions, though other funds—such as Norwegian pension fund KLP and Australia’s Future Fund —believe it still might be doing so and have consequently divested from the company.) Second, Scotiabank’s investment in Elbit is huge. As of last April, the bank was the largest foreign shareholder in the company with a $500 million investment. It has since halved its stake in Elbit, which implies it’s no longer the largest foreign shareholder, though it’s still listed as such on Elbit’s investor relations page. Still, even halved, its investment far outstrips other Canadian banks; as of last spring, TD Bank and Royal Bank of Canada had a combined $3 million investment, while BMO faced criticism in 2021 over a subsidiary’s USD$90 million loan to the company. And pre-divestment, KLP held $5.4 million worth of shares. So, it’s not just that Scotiabank is profiting from genocide, it’s also the scale at which it’s profiting. (Scotiabank’s investment in Elbit and other controversial Israeli companies can be traced back to one fund—Dynamic Funds—run by an executive whose public social media posts indicated a political opposition to Palestinian liberation, according to The Intercept.)

As for the other companies listed in the letter, the Azrieli Foundation operated gas stations on settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are illegal under international law (the company sold that subsidiary in 2016), and makes millions of dollars in donations to Zionist groups. Indigo’s CEO Heather Reisman and her husband, Gerald Schwartz fund the HESEG Foundation, which provides scholarships to ‘lone soldiers,’ who are typically non-Israelis who immigrate to Israel specifically to serve in the IDF. Meaning, the organization is essentially incentivizing foreigners to join Israel’s military. And Audible is owned by Amazon, which partners with Palantir, a tech company run by “outspoken” Zionist Alex Carp. (Though since the release of the letter, Audible has clarified that its relationship with the Gillers ended in 2023.)

This goes beyond the usual tension between commerce and art

In some ways, this does feel like a conversation we’ve been having for a long time about where arts funding comes from, and how much it matters whether those sources are ‘good.’ In a 2019 op-ed for international art magazine Apollo, art historian and former museum administrator Maxwell L. Anderson explains that “beginning with the robber barons of the 19th century, gifts from even tainted sources have been central to cultural organisations,” for example. And we’ve seen lots of protests around arts orgs accepting funding from fossil fuel companies or unethical pharma giants—in the U.K., The Tate, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Shakespeare Company, Scottish Ballet and Royal Opera House ended years-long funding partnerships with oil company BP in the mid to late 2010s due to climate concerns—or at least, due to the bad press associated with their continued association with the fossil fuel giant. And museums on both sides of the pond began refusing donations from the Sacklers, the founding family behind Purdue Pharma, after allegations that the company engaged in dishonest marketing practices to boost sales of its tentpole product, OxyContin.

As Anderson put it, while arts organizations once accepted these donations with relatively little controversy, “suspicion is [now] growing about the motivation of those giving to museums—are these individuals committed to free expression and abjuring art-market influence to buy or show particular artists, or are they in pursuit of tax deductions, social acceptance, and advance knowledge that could guide their own art investments?” Writing in the same issue, museum administrator David Fleming expands on the social acceptance/art-washing angle, saying, “why on earth would private funding be available for non-profit organisations? The answer lies, of course, in the perceived value of association; in this case, the association of profit-making entities with the ‘truthful’ agencies that, to many people, museums are. There is, of course, nothing wrong with profit-making businesses giving money to museums… The trouble is that some museums, but by no means all, have come to be associated with profit-making enterprises operating in extremely controversial circumstances.” (A 2015 report also found that Canadian consumers value companies that support the arts, so there are lots of marketing reasons for this type of funding.)

But as always, I’m interested in thinking about what this relatively niche controversy can tell us about other things, like wider societal values. And on that point, while I don’t think it’s all that useful to analyze whether climate change, creating millions of addicts or profiting from genocide is ‘worse,’ I do think there is a specificity and a currency to what is happening in Palestine that impacts the conversation around the Gillers. We are hearing horrific stories every single day—on Commotion, El Akkad talks about communicating with the Gillers on the same day that he saw a photo of a six-year-old girl who had starved to death. This week, I’ve had a hard time not thinking about 24-year-old Muhammed Bhar, a Palestinian man with Down Syndrome and autism whose family said he was attacked by an IDF dog, separated at gunpoint from his loved ones by IDF soldiers and then left to die, alone and terrified. Oxfam just released a report finding that Israel’s “systemic weaponizing of water against Palestinians in Gaza has reduced the amount of water available… by 94% to 4.74 litres a day per person.” This obviously has serious implications for thirst, but also for hygiene—and in fact, the World Health Organization says 150,000 Palestinians have contracted skin diseases because they are being forced to live in squalid conditions. And there are thousands of equally affecting stories exactly like these ones; I’ve been listing them in this newsletter for months.

We are also in a unique social, cultural and political moment. For years, Palestine was an untouchable topic, and even an ‘unsayable’ word—it was considered too complicated, too contentious, too distant to engage with in a meaningful or sustained way. That is no longer the case. U.K. NGO Action for Humanity commissioned YouGov polling to determine where public opinion in the U.K. stands on Palestine. According to its CEO, the polling “found that 56 percent of the U.K. are now in favour of halting arms exports to Israel. Only 17 percent are against and the rest are unsure. This is huge. We have been polling the public on conflicts like Syria and Yemen for years and never have the U.K. public not just been so aware of a conflict, but also feel so passionately about it… And this is a pattern we are seeing all across the Western world.” At the same time, people are increasingly understanding that our struggles are linked; there is a whole web of connections between stagnating wages, housing crises, discrimination and general hardship in the west and poverty, displacement, torture and death in the global south.

Conversely, many Western politicians, corporations and institutions remain resistant to challenging the status quo… and I think that dichotomy is actually the most interesting part of the Gillers controversy. On one hand, there is a growing and deeply committed contingent of people who can’t ‘unknow’ what they now understand about how the world operates, who see the connections between their own personal experiences of oppression and global events, and who are increasingly disillusioned with the idea of western empire. These people often experience marginalization, and are asking themselves big questions about what it looks like to uphold their values, how that might be at odds with the white supremacist, colonial and patriarchal structures that give shape to our society, and what their personal and political thresholds are. And on the other hand, there are a lot of people who seem to think ‘all of this’ will blow over and eventually, we’ll go back to ‘normal.’

The thing is, I don’t think that can, or will, happen. It’s like that analogy about not being able to put toothpaste back in the tube once you’ve squeezed it out; for better or for worse, people who have found comfort and purpose in the idea of collective liberation—and who have spent months using their voices, despite the risk to their academic and professional futures—aren’t just going to shut up. They’re not going to accept the benevolent condescension of more powerful people telling them to just be patient and eventually the world will somehow, magically become fairer—without the need for drastic disruptions from protests and boycotts. I don’t really know how to bridge those two worldviews, tbh. But I do know this won’t be the last time we have this conversation.

And Did You Hear About…

Anne T. Donahue’s v. convincing argument that The Blair Witch Project, which was released 25 years ago this month, should be remembered as “a cautionary tale for tech.” 

The TikTok account for Mohawk Chevrolet, a car dealership in Ballston Spa, NY that’s going viral for its hilarious Office-inspired mockumentary videos. Also: this interview with the digital branding creator behind this series is really interesting.

Smithsonian magazine’s There’s More to That podcast, which kiiiiiiinda feels like You’re Wrong About for science. (This week’s episode is about Pablo Escobar’s hippos, which obviously made me click instantly.)

This Cosmo longread by health writer Chloe Gray on the problematic #StrongNotSkinny trend of the early 2010s, and how it relates to today’s resurgence of diet culture.

The Cut’s very important reporting on how men in finance feel about TikToker @girl_on_couch’s viral song.

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MediaStacy Lee KongOmar El Akkad, Scotiabank Giller Prize, Palestine, Gaza Strip, Israel