“We can throw a wrench into the war machine”: Why pro-Palestine Canadian authors are boycotting the Giller Prize

It’s been a year since protesters disrupted the 2023 Giller Prize ceremony, carrying signs that read “Scotiabank funds genocide” and calling out the connection between the Gillers’ lead sponsor and Elbit Systems, one of Israel’s largest arms manufacturers. The fallout was immediate—first for the protesters, three of whom were arrested and charged, and then for the Canadian arts community, which remains sharply divided a year later.

“Business as usual cannot go on,” says Toronto graphic novelist Michael DeForge, one of the early organizers behind CanLit Responds, a collective of authors and culture workers calling on the Giller Prize to cut ties with Scotiabank, Indigo Books and the Azrieli Foundation. In July, the group launched a boycott that now includes more than 30 Canadian authors who have removed their eligible work from consideration for this year’s prize. In advance of this year’s awards on November 18, DeForge spoke with Toronto Life about the power of collective action, the problem with whataboutism and why the writers’ boycott won’t end until their demands are met.

Let’s start with last year’s Giller Prize. Were you there? Were you aware of the plans for a protest before it happened? I was not at the 2023 awards ceremony, and I didn’t know about the protest, but I did hear about it pretty immediately as the footage started to circulate online. The Giller Prize edited the incident out of its broadcast, but on YouTube you could see the unedited version, where the protesters take the stage and then you can actually hear people in the audience booing. That really did feel like a line in the sand had been drawn. If this is the Canadian publishing industry—people booing acts of solidarity with Palestine and cheering on the arrests of these protesters—it’s not one I want to be part of. Based on some conversations I had with other authors, it was clear I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. A few authors got together to draft the original open letter, and then it circulated online, which is how I and many other authors came across it. That was the beginning of CanLit Responds.

Just for clarity, when you say CanLit Responds, this a response to what specifically? The day after the awards, the executive director of the Giller Prize, Elana Rabinovitch, released a statement about how the protesters had shown “disrespect to Canadian authors and their achievements.” Part of the thinking behind CanLit Responds was to refute that—to say that there are a lot of Canadian authors who didn’t feel that way and who supported the protesters. Our open letter, which has now been signed by over 2,000 Canadian writers, was calling for the charges against the protesters to be dropped and for the Giller Prize to cut ties with Scotiabank.

What do you make of the argument that there are better places to stage a protest than at a night meant to celebrate Canadian artists?  I think it’s ridiculous. People will often say, “This isn’t the right time” or “This isn’t the right place.” And when they’re pressed on it, you realize that they never actually think there’s a right time or a right place. The situation in Gaza right now is so bad—hundreds are dying every day. A recent Lancet study found that the death toll in Palestine since October of 2023 could exceed 186,000 people. There is an active genocide happening, and we live in a country and work in an industry where people enabling the genocide, cheering on the genocide or profiting from of the genocide are right in front of our faces. This is one way we can throw a wrench into that war machine. If now isn’t the time to talk about it, I don’t know when that time would be.

All of these CanLit institutions talk about how literature can be liberating, uplifting marginalized voices, the transformative power of books and that sort of thing. They gesture toward politics when it’s convenient. And then the Gillers released a statement saying they did not want the prize to be a political tool, but clearly the prize is a political tool. In our opinion, it’s a political tool currently being used by Scotiabank, as well as Indigo and the Azrieli Foudation, to obscure their involvement in an ongoing genocide.

So why target a Canadian arts charity and not the bank itself? Because it is through sponsorship of arts organizations that Scotiabank is able to position itself as the bank of Canadian arts and culture. Banks don’t have moral compasses to appeal to, and they don’t sponsor awards out of a genuine love of the arts. They do it because it is good publicity. That gives us leverage, as authors and artists, to say that we want our arts institutions to represent us and that we don’t want our work used in service of a genocide. If Scotiabank is going to use a platform like the Gillers to promote its logo and paint itself as a benevolent lover of the arts, we have an opportunity to use that sponsorship against it, to basically make it a publicity nightmare so long as the companies it invests in remain complicit in the deaths of Palestinians.

And the Gillers are not the only organization we are targeting. In February, we founded No Arms in the Arts, which is an umbrella organization to bring together different sectors in the arts community and demand that our prizes and festivals cut ties with Scotiabank. In April, we launched the No Arms in the Arts Film Festival: 11 days of counter-programming to the Scotiabank-funded Hot Docs that was also about creating a supportive space for Palestinian artists and solidarity. We organized an info picket outside of the Scotiabank Photography Award, where we handed flyers, hosted speakers and had one-on-one conversations with people who didn’t necessarily know about our cause.

And why not protest, say, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award? Amazon has spent billions supporting Israel and its military AI network. I would very much welcome an organizer with more time on their hands to take on Amazon. But I think your question is something of a whataboutism. The goal of boycotts is not to achieve some kind of moral purity. We live in a world of compromise and grey areas, and we try to target our efforts where we have the most leverage.

Have you heard a lot of dismissive comments like “Do you really think a bunch of Canadian authors can make a difference?” We have, but I would say those voices have gotten awfully quiet since Scotiabank cut its stake in Elbit by more than 40 per cent, with the CEO of Elbit actually citing pressure from the Canadian public on Scotiabank as one of the reasons. Obviously it’s not just artists who have been protesting, but I think if you look at some of the most visible advocacy, it has been around the cultural sector. So, yeah, clearly a bunch of artists can make a material difference.

Scotiabank has denied any connection between its divestment in Elbit and the protests. I think it’s sort of expected that Scotiabank would want to save face. They have tried to take the line that their investments are strictly about economics.

Last July, CanLit Responds launched a boycott of the Gillers, with many authors withdrawing their work from consideration for the 2024 award. Was that a response to anything in particular? In terms of timing, we knew that the longlist of nominees would be coming out soon, and we still hadn’t received a meaningful response to our initial letter more than six months later. Instead we had seen evidence of what seemed to be an ideological commitment to anti-Palestinian censorship on the part of the Giller Foundation, so it felt like an escalation was warranted. The new letter is a commitment from Canadian authors to boycott the Gillers until the prize cuts ties with Scotiabank, Indigo and the Azrieli Foundation. At first it was artists who had work that was eligible for the 2024 prize as well as past Giller Prize winners, shortlisters and longlisters. Just this month, we expanded it to include authors withdrawing future work until our demands are met.

You said some of the Giller Foundation’s actions have revealed an ideological commitment to anti-Palestinian censorship. Can you be more specific? Sarah Bernstein, the winner of the 2023 award, has said that she was told that any questions about Gaza would be edited out of her Giller Book Club appearance. There is also the letter that the Giller Foundation sent to publishers in April saying that any authors submitting their work for this year’s prize should be willing to honour the commitments of the nomination, so basically get in line for this year’s ceremony. That felt like an escalation on their part.

I understand what you’re saying, but couldn’t it also be described as “don’t apply for a job if you don’t want to take the job?” If the Gillers are actually about honouring great writing, then expecting those writers to make their participation in the prize conditional does not seem fair to me.

Have any of the past winners offered to return their prize money in protest? No, but we haven’t had direct conversations about that—it’s not something we would ask of them. I can’t speak to the individual situations of past winners, many of whom have spoken very eloquently about their dissent. But the point is not to litigate how individually compromised any one person may or may not be. This is a collective refusal, and that’s what we’re emphasizing.

In terms of the authors who have submitted work for this year’s prize or who have not joined the boycott, is the divide based on political convictions? A difference of opinion about the role of politics in prize-giving? Again, I can’t speak to the motivations of any particular author. I have had a lot of conversations with authors over the past year and can say that there are some who disagree politically, others who have very real fears of blacklisting and career repercussions, and others who think that the benefits of winning the prize outweigh the power of collective organizing.

So many authors can barely make ends meet. Can you blame them for not wanting to turn their back on this potential windfall? I know that the prize is a life-changing amount of money for the author who is going to win it, but I don’t believe that anything could really be worth that level of complicity with what is happening to the Palestinian people. We are interested in changing our industry for the better, removing ties to the military industrial complex, to genocide, to mass death. That involves having to reshape the industry, and part of that is rebuilding the structures so that we can make a living without relying on the benevolence of genocidal corporations. I don’t think that’s such a radical thing to ask for, and together we have the power to make it happen. Artists are why this all runs. You can’t have film festivals or book prizes without artists.

You often hear that we have lost the art of civil discourse in modern society. Have you found that to be the case, or are you able to have productive conversations with authors and artists who don’t share your convictions? We absolutely have had conversations, though many of them have been frustrating or disappointing or heated. We don’t come across a lot of people who outright disagree with our campaign so much as those who may not agree with the tactic of a boycott in particular. We’ve also talked to a lot of people who are afraid to take the risk, and we have won a lot of them over by showing that there is strength in numbers.

Should the Giller Prize have pressed pause on the award this year while reviewing its sponsorship options? Obviously I’m not running the prize. I will say that the urgency of what’s happening in Gaza warrants an immediate response, and if that means not having a gala for a year, so be it.

If the Gillers do cut ties with Scotiabank as well as Indigo and the Azrieli Foundation, does everything go back to normal? “Back to normal” may be a stretch considering how the Giller Foundation has responded. However, the boycott demands are clear. If they are met, the boycott would end.

Are there any plans to disrupt the Gillers this evening? We have organized programming—a series of in-person and livestreamed events in cities where the Gillers would normally do events to coincide with the prize ceremony but aren’t this year. We thought this was a good moment to have writers share work by Palestinian authors. A lot of the people doing readings across the country will be Canadian authors who have signed the boycott letter. So it’s another way of having authors show up for one another.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.