Giller Prize controversy spotlights tensions between politics and literary prizes

Canada’s Giller Prize was recently awarded to novelist and poet Anne Michaels for her novel Held amid controversy.

The Giller Prize is Canada’s most lucrative literary award, with a prize package of $100,000 for the winner and $10,000 for the shortlisted nominees.

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The prestige of the award is being overshadowed by substantial criticism and protest. The advocacy coalition of arts groups No Arms in the Arts is calling for the Giller Foundation to push lead sponsor Scotiabank to fully divest from Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms company. In August, media reported Scotiabank’s asset management subsidiary had reduced its shares in Elbit Systems, following public pressure.

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Some Giller winners (Sarah Bernstein, Suzette Mayr, Omar El Akkad, Madeleine Thien, Sean Michaels, Lynn Coady, Johanna Skibsrud and Michael Ondaatje) state in an open letter that “the only way to remedy what has been a deeply divisive period in Canadian arts is for the chief funders of so many arts prizes and organizations in Canada — banks such as Scotiabank — to divest from companies whose products are currently being used in mass killing.”

While the controversy is about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict interfering with the world of Canadian letters, it also reveals deeply antagonistic ideas about literature’s social role.

Calls to cut ties

Last year’s Giller awards had already been troubled by protests. This year, two jurors withdrew and over 300 members of the literary community signed a petition asking for the Giller Foundation to cut ties not only with Scotiabank but also with Indigo Books.

Thien, who won the Giller in 2016, asked not to be associated with the prize after her offer to raise money to fund this year’s award from previous Giller winners was rejected. She and El Akkad, Giller 2021 winner, have spoken out against how award administrators have handled authors’ calls.

Forum for political debate

How can a literary prize become a forum for political debate? The notion of literary prestige and identifying what is prescriptive in a book’s success is being profoundly challenged by social networks and algorithms. Literary prizes remain an important driver in book sales and in a writer’s reputation. More concretely, when the prize is endowed, prizes are a way for writers to earn a living.

It is worth mentioning that in Canada, the latest income survey from the Writers’ Union of Canada of its members and other writers, based on 2017 incomes, indicated an average net income from writing of $9,380.

Art and commerce

As English professor James English points out, a binary opposition between art and commerce (either you are a sell-out or not) is not very fertile for thinking about the logic of literary prizes. Firstly, prestige is abstract as a notion, similar to what leads us to pay five times more for a branded T-shirt.

A literary prize functions to set the value of an author, without regard to his or her commercial value, automatically conferring prestige. But what if the money that accompanies the prize compromises artistic integrity? And does the artist become compromised by the commercial success that follows the prize? These are all questions to which there are no clear answers.

But also, literary prizes are the perfect symbol of a difficult encounter between a book and its commercialization by bringing big ideas and poetic beauty down to earth.

Who finances the prize, and what political ideas does a writer who cashes the check associate with? Where does their loyalty lie? What is their accountability? We can also debate the racism or sexism of literary prize juries and whether they reproduce systemic inequalities in the name of art.

Political controversies surrounding literary prizes are common. The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to German writer Peter Handke in 2019 brought back accusations of denying genocide and being a supporter of Serb ultranationalism.

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At the other end of the spectrum, British writer John Berger gave half of the 1972 Booker Prize award for his novel G. to the English Black Panthers.

Views in the controversy

According to the Giller winners who penned an open letter, and other writers, writers have a responsibility not to participate in this public relations machine that is supporting Israel’s war on Gaza. The Giller Foundation, for its part, states that the prize is not a political tool.

Anne Michaels’s statement after the prize was awarded spoke about the politics of art itself. “Everything I write is a form of witness — against war, against indifference, against amnesia of every sort.” She also wrote that every book bears “its own witness … its own form of resistance and assertion,” and affirmed her solidarity with all other writers, as well as with Canadian booksellers and publishers.

This statement suggests a defence of art’s relative autonomy from social issues, and a belief that its responsibility is towards the community of readers, and not to society as a whole. She also noted: “A short time ago, less than 70 years — we lived in a country where only 14 books of Canadian fiction were published in a year — fewer in the entire country than the longlist for this prize.”

Polarization around cultural institutions

These comments also suggest a form of print nationalism creeping into Michaels’s argument, a position echoed by writer Stephen Marche. He perceives the controversy surrounding the Giller as a sign of the decay of a divisive left, and the political polarization around cultural institutions as harmful to Canadian culture.

Michaels also draws attention to the fragility of a literary ecosystem, where Canadian literature struggles to be visible in the absence of a robust network of independent bookstores. Visibility is indeed an immense challenge for Canadian writers (inside Canada and beyond), and a literary prize is, by definition, a visibility vehicle.

Writer Ian Williams, 2019 Giller winner, also adds another aspect to the debate, questioning a binary approach to these issues.

Each side, in its own way, shows how literature is dependent on the material conditions that make writing and publishing books possible. While Michaels claims the right to bear witness to the horrors of the world through literature, sponsorship detractors force us to reflect that there can be no truly free art if it is indirectly complicit in perpetuating violence.