Some thoughts on the Giller saga

A word of caution to everyone who usually comes here for grief and space and occasional dog talk: this post is going to be a little different. I do think that questions of art and activism are questions for us all, but they’re also questions that we all have to grapple with on our own time and in our own spaces, and that time and space will be wildly different for everyone.

This post might not be your thing, and so. Feel free to ignore at will.

Photo by Kalei de Leon on Unsplash

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A few days ago, an announcement was made listing twenty writers who’ve withdrawn their books from consideration for this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize. (The Giller, for anyone who might not know, is the Canadian equivalent to the Booker. It awards $100,000 CDN to a novel or book of short stories published in Canada in a calendar year.) This announcement came on the heels of last year’s Giller controversy in November, when activists protesting the war in Gaza stormed the Giller stage and brought attention to the fact that Scotiabank holds the largest share in Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer. The protesters were removed from the stage and charges pressed against them. Over 1,700 authors and academics in Canada and elsewhere signed a letter calling for the charges to be dropped. I was and am one of those authors.

At the time of last November’s Giller ceremony, Scotiabank had almost $500 million USD invested in Elbit Systems; in the ensuing months, due in part to heavy criticism from the Canadian literary world and beyond, Scotiabank nearly halved its stake. In the announcement made earlier this week, the authors who have withdrawn their books for consideration from the prize call on the Giller Foundation to, and I quote:

1. Use their organizational leverage to pressure their main sponsor, Scotiabank, to fully divest from Elbit Systems.

2. Cut ties with all funders directly invested in Israeli occupation and genocide in Palestine including the Azraeli Foundation, Indigo, and Audible.

Our goal, says the statement, is to truly win an arts and culture sector free from arms funding.

The Giller Foundation issued a response to this announcement on Thursday, noting that they won’t be dropping the sponsorship.

I am so deeply disappointed in their response to this, but I am also emphatically not surprised.

I am so proud of all of the authors who have signed that letter and withdrawn their names from consideration for this year’s prize. I think it was brave, and necessary, and I am honoured to call so many of these writers my friends.

I am also—and I cannot stress this enough—thinking about all of the authors who have not withdrawn their names, who may be afraid to do so, who may be even more afraid to talk publicly about being afraid to withdraw, or about not wanting to withdraw just in general. I am thinking about all of the authors who want to keep their books in the running, authors who are perhaps out with a small publisher and don’t have a community yet or a social media following, authors who would love the boost of being on an awards list, who are worrying even now about whether or not that decision to stay in for consideration makes them a terrible person.

I am thinking about these authors most of all.

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It is almost impossibly difficult to enter into conversations like these today without being accused of both sidesing an issue, and so let me be very clear right from the outset: I support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. I think that Israel needs to be held accountable for war crimes, and I also think that that Hamas needs to be held accountable for their war crimes as well. I believe we need to be working toward a world where police and carceral institutions are defunded and restorative justice becomes our go-to. This means that holding institutions and organizations and countries accountable does not equate to throwing people in jail and leaving them to rot. This means, necessarily, that the road toward accountability and healing and change is long and slow and littered with shit. It is incredibly complex and incredibly complicated and just because it is complicated does not mean we give up: it means we dig our heels in deeper, and prepare for a long and disheartening bend toward justice. Hope is a discipline, as Mariame Kaba has said. It is the thing you wake up and choose over and over, even—maybe especially—when it doesn’t shine and sparkle.

The war that has raged on for months is abominable and needs to be stopped, and the inherently violent system of Israeli apartheid that gave rise to this war (along with the inherently violent systems that dominate most of our planet) also needs (and need) to be stopped.

It is all violent, and it all needs to end. And we need to be prepared for how messy that end and new growth toward something else is going to be.

Beyond that, I am going to leave discussions of the war to those who are better equipped to talk about it.

I should also note that I don’t have a Giller-eligible book out this year. I have never been on a Giller list. I will publish a novel next year that will technically be eligible, and I already have extremely mixed feelings about this. If we are in the same situation next year, I may very well ask my publisher to withdraw my book from consideration. But part of the mixed feelings is a nagging sense of moot point because my publisher likely would not submit my book anyway. Does the act of withdrawing your book matter if your publisher was not going to submit it in the first place? I don’t know.

What I want to talk about today is arts funding, and how we move forward in a capitalist world (hellscape, even) where arts funding dwindles every year.

If you are an author in Canada (and likely elsewhere, though for my purposes today I will stick to this corner of the world), your work is most probably inextricably linked to and reliant on public and private funding in some way, most of which—if we’re being honest—is some degree of dirty. If you are a traditionally published author, you might have a publisher who has published someone else who’s problematic, or perhaps you’ve appeared at a festival or reading series that has a corporate sponsor with questionable investments, or maybe you’ve been nominated for a prize with that questionable corporate sponsor, or or or—there are lots of ways in which the road to publication and promotion reveals itself to be filled with ick, just as that road is also, at the same time, filled with moments of joy and pride and so many wonderful people who love what they do and live for getting good stories out into the world.

(And if you’re a self-published author, you likely have your books for sale on Amazon. As do we all. See? There’s trouble everywhere you look.)

We live in a both-and world, and what I have been seeing over these last few years—certainly during the last few months, yes, but I noticed a big uptick in this kind of thinking during COVID, even as I also recognize that this kind of thinking is a mark of being human and has always existed, ever since we’ve been human-ing on the planet—is a growing tendency for people to decamp, to move into either/or thinking. The scarier things get, the more entrenched we are. This or that. You are with us or you’re not. You cannot be with us if you think these things. This will solve the world, and this will destroy it. In order to save it, we must all do these things, and these things only.

And so, my first question is: how do we, as authors, move our complicated, baggage-laden selves and books through a complicated, baggage-laden publishing landscape and call for change when many of these calls for change often seem to embrace simple decisions and actions that assume no baggage at all?

(Note that I said seem to embrace. I am well aware that most people, when you talk to them as individuals, recognize the tricky labyrinth of trying to do good in an inherently not-good system. We all know it’s complicated. And yet so often the calls to action that come out of movements seem to…ignore exactly this.)

In our both-and world, I am acutely aware of the difficulties inherent in corporate sponsorship of the arts. I know that far too many corporations (most of them, let’s be real) paper over their misdeeds and rephrensible behaviour by sponsoring arts organizations and claiming to promote, in public, the very things they seek to dismantle in other ways.

I know that any system that relies on corporate sponsorship is flawed. I know also that the system is flawed this way by design: if you pay artists abysmal rates, and cultivate a scarcity mentality (and landscape), then any artist who is not economically privileged is more or less forced to play by the rules in order to survive.

But as someone who has worked in arts administration for over a decade, many of those years in Canada, I also know that corporate sponsorship plays a key role in bringing so many of the arts events that we know and love to life. In particular, corporate sponsorship is often the only way for organizations to get accessibility funding. As an example: do you know how much it costs to have closed captioning and ASL available at all of your events over the course of a week, if you run a festival? If you do it properly, taking into consideration language equity and availability of service? $20,000, easy. Probably more depending on how many events you have. And this doesn’t even account for printing programs in Braille or large print or producing plain language summaries, or offering audio description, or paying extra (if you’re in Toronto or similar places) for an accessible venue, or having an accessibility coordinator on staff, which is something that all organizations who offer public services should be doing. Do they do it? No! Because nobody has any money!

Federal and provincial grant funding is catching up to the importance of accessibility and trying to offer more where they can. But we still have a ways to go. And while it is possible to bridge some of that gap using other means—donations, or ticket revenue—it is not always possible in the moment. It is certainly not possible instantaneously.

It’s not impossible to put on an accessible, inclusive event without corporate sponsorship. But depending on the event you want to do or the prize you want to award, it is going to be difficult to do it on the scale of “life-changing” without significant investment from a corporate sponsor or someone else who has money. This is the world that we live in, right now.

Let’s make no mistake. I think the Giller has done a lot for Canadian publishing, both good and bad, since its inception in 1994. As an author, I can say without hesitation that I would love a $100,000 prize. I would try so hard to do good things with that money.

But at the same time I am also skeptical of a corporate partnership that touts upwards of $140,000 CAD in prize money to authors every year ($100,000 to the winner, $10,000 to the finalists) while simultaneously investing hundreds of millions of dollars¹ in arms manufacturers and fossil fuel technologies.

Can you imagine what the arts landscape in this country would look like if Scotiabank invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Canadian publishing, instead of a few hundred thousand?² I can’t. It is so fantastical it literally boggles my mind.

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We also need to acknowledge something else, and that is this: $100,000 CDN both is, and is not, a lot of money.

It is a lot of money because $100,000 is more than most writers will ever see for a single project in their lifetimes. $100,000 can lift someone out of debt. (It would lift me out of debt, and I would be very thankful for that alone.) It can pay medical bills. It can ease up the constant grind of freelancing and having to worry about where food will come from. $100,000 can mitigate all of these things to a huge extent.

But it is also not a lot of money, not anymore. $100,000 is two years of writing time at a livable wage, if you’re lucky. And this assumes that you can get a lot of work done in that two years. Many books take far longer than that.

$100,000 is also two years at a mostly-livable wage in a city like Toronto, or Hamilton, where I live. It is probably not two years of a livable wage in somewhere like Vancouver. It is also, as I’ve noted, probably not two years of a livable wage if you have debt to pay, or if you have dependents, or medical bills, or really any kind of extenuating circumstance that might eat into money you would otherwise use for living.

It is definitely not enough money to suddenly start living a lavish lifestyle where you buy your own private jet and swan about in different countries, writing stories and living happily in your head with your characters forevermore.

You know what is, though? The $9.4 million—including his pension and other benefits—that Scotiabank CEO Scott Thomson was paid in 2023.

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I’m coming down heavy on Scotiabank, I know, but Scotiabank is actually just one symptom of a much larger problem. Corporate funding is a large part of literary prizes and also literary festivals in this country, running the gamut from small publishers to banks and others. Where does the money for events, for accessibility, for prizes, come from if not from corporate funders? If you are a festival, do you raise your ticket prices to cover costs—making it so that all but the most wealthy can’t come to your events anymore? Do you campaign to have federal grant money increased? What happens if federal or provincial funding is frozen, as it often is? Do you appeal to your donor base? What happens if that donor base is not filled with rich white people who are snobby and bored? How do you account for the rising costs of living as an organization when your grant money and donor money stays the same year after year?

Is it actually possible to move toward “an arts and culture sector that is free from arms funding” and keep all of the bright spots of Canadian literary culture as we know them? I am honestly asking this question, because I don’t know if it is. Scotiabank is only one corporate funder for one award; there are many others. The Amazon First Novel Award. The Carol Shields Prize, sponsored by BMO. TD Bank sponsors literary festivals. Audible, another Giller sponsor, has sponsored other CanLit festivals and events.

Can we do without these funders? Maybe we can, in the long run. But will the landscape look the same? It absolutely will not. Organizations will lose corporate funding and struggle to make up the shortfall. In the short term, they will cut all of the “fat” from their programming, which will often—though it shouldn’t—mean cutting essential-but-viewed-as-extraneous things like accessibility. People will lose jobs. Organizations will restructure or close completely. Prize money will dwindle; maybe some prizes will also disappear.

And some of that could be good! (Not the accessibility cuts, obviously.) Maybe all of this does need to change, and this is the wake-up call to set all of these things in motion. Maybe we can use our collective power as artists to pressure corporate funders to divest from arms companies and fossil fuels and find better causes in which to invest. Maybe we do—as this article by the writer Shani Mootoo so wonderfully points out—need to consider what a world with smaller prizes would look like, if corporate sponsors do not divest and the decision is made to part with a sponsor as a result.

Will it be a truer, more beautiful world to imagine these smaller prizes and a richer, more grassroots kind of literary community, one where we hold each other up and find new ways of surviving? One where, in the ultimate dream, maybe we don’t need prizes in the first place in order for authors to eke out successful careers? Of course it will.

We are going to lose a lot in the process, though, even temporarily. Literary prizes, yes. But also maybe literary festivals, and reading series, and other events that try to get books out into the world who find themselves unable to do so when the money just is no longer there. If we don’t lose them, we’re probably going to lose a lot of the inclusion and access that has slowly been creeping into these spaces over the past few years. Because these organizations will cut where they can in order to survive, and when given a choice between accessible programming that costs too much and inaccessible programming that at least allows some things to continue, most organizations will choose the later. I’ve seen it happen, over and over.

And so. Capitalism is a bitch. And maybe it is indeed a bitch in its dying throes, but until that actually happens, how do we go on creating community and ensuring that there are soft places for everyone to land when the resources available to us shrink more every day? How do we help each other keep hope alive when our activist calls to action are so much easier for those with privilege to enact? How do we move forward and celebrate those who appear on calls-to-action like the Giller withdrawal list, and continue to celebrate those who may make different choices, recognizing that all of our choices are less than perfect?

How do we continue to celebrate literary culture in Canada when corporate sponsorship—much of which is tied up in arms funding—is at present an integral part of the money that gets these things done? What do we do if these corporate sponsors do not divest? How do we continue to survive and thrive in truly inclusive, accessible ways when all of that costs money? How do we make peace with this changing landscape and also recognize that we probably won’t see all of the changes that we’d like, at least not in our lifetimes?

I think it’s high time for the Giller to have a reckoning. This is not a bad thing. Change is the only constant in this beautiful world of ours. Maybe it is time for the Giller to scale down, to re-imagine itself. Maybe instead of one larger prize it offers several smaller, equal prizes. Maybe it incorporates a mentorship program into its offerings, the way that the Writers’ Trust has done for years. The Foundation has donated large sums to mentorship programs and organizations before—this could be an outgrowth of all of that previous work. Maybe the focus should always have been less on prize money and more on strengthening the literary community of which we’re all a part. There is room for real growth here, and a real opportunity to build something else that points away from the prize culture that has (dare I say it) artificially inflated the Canadian literary system for the past few decades.

Prizes can be wonderful but they can also suck all of the oxygen out of the room. Maybe it is time for us all to reach for something else.

I think the answer here is sustained pressure, probably over a long period of time. The Foundation has said it will not cut ties with Scotiabank; I am assuming this means it will not cut ties with its other funders, at least not yet. So how, then, do we go about building this new world? How do we encourage people to keep doing what they can while also recognizing that what they can do is going to be different for everybody?

I want the authors who appear on this year’s Giller lists to feel proud of what they’ve achieved and accomplished, just as I want those who’ve chosen to withdraw their books to feel proud of what they’ve accomplished too. I want them to feel comfortable speaking out where they can. I want us all to understand that if someone chooses to participate in Giller events and activities and speaks out at those events, it is an action that should also be commended—that we shouldn’t be shaming people for participating in Giller events, or claiming that they are also complicit in genocide simply because they wanted to participate in the literary community in the ways that we have touted for so long.

To be clear, again: I know (at least I hope!) that the goal of those who withdrew their books from consideration was not to shame anyone who might make a different decision. But the spotlight of social media is so good at flattening these issues, at making them into one-dimensional either/or choices. The world that we live in never works that way. Most things are never easy. Who are we, as writers, if we don’t acknowledge that?

Not everyone can afford to withdraw from consideration for things like the Giller. Most authors in Canada are struggling. Some of us have more privilege than others, economic or otherwise, and try hard to use that privilege in ways that can raise awareness and galvanize issues. But I worry that we are pressuring people to undertake the same actions and put themselves in the same positions of precarity, and I don’t see how that pressure always helps us move forward into the truer, more beautiful world we all want. Some people will not be able to activism in ways that are available to others. Some people will not want to activism in ways that are available to others, but will try and fight for change in their own ways and capacities.

Our community is changing and we are being asked to change with it. But that change, if it is truly going to last, never happens all at once. It is long and slow and difficult, and we will probably not see all of the changes that we’d like, at least not in our lifetimes.

But this is what it means, doesn’t it, to wake up and choose hope every day. It is grimy and boring and unpleasant work, and it can be infuriating when you look around and feel like other people are making counterintuitive decisions or actions that go against that trajectory of hope. I think the key, though, is to understand that we are all of us reaching for hope in our own way. We are all making imperfect choices. Some days we have less hope than others. But onward we go, nonetheless.

I have always tried hard to nurture spaces and communities where writers and artists feel welcome and seen, both in my arts admin work and in my own work as a writer. I am trying hard to continue this work now, in this new stage of full-time artistic destitution freelance writing, even as I recognize that Substack is, itself, a problematic platform. (See? It’s all icky, everywhere.) If I’ve learned anything from my time in this industry, it is that there is space for everything, even when we’re filled with rage. You breathe in, and you breathe out, and you let go of wanting to do it all, instantly. You recognize that the victories will come, and so will the defeats.

Hope asks that you do not stop, ever, for either of these things. And so: I am not stopping. I am going to cheer for everybody and fight where I can, to the best of my capacities. I will never stop reaching for that truer, more beautiful world. I hope you don’t either, even as the world tries to get you down. I hope you can get comfortable in the mud and the muck and give yourself grace for all of the mistakes and the less-than-savoury decisions you’ll have to make over your own course of human-ing on this planet.

Because the more grace you have for yourself, the more grace you’ll have for others. And grace is something we’re all going to continue to need.

Be generous with it. This is the only way to be.

1. US dollars, no less—we love a ghastly exchange rate over here, yes we do.

2. I am aware that they probably invest more across various streams. But they are still not investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the book industry; if they did, things would look very different.