WEBSITE (VOICE): Canada’s Giller Prize was recently awarded to novelist and poet Anne Michaels for her novel Held amid much controversy.
The Giller Prize is Canada’s most lucrative literary award, with a prize package worth $100,000 to the winner and $10,000 to the shortlisted nominees.
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The reputation of the award is being tarnished by strong criticism and opposition. The advocacy coalition of arts groups No Arms in the Arts is calling on the Giller Foundation to push main funder Scotiabank to fully divest from Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms company. In August, media reported that Scotiabank’s asset management subsidiary had reduced its stake in Elbit Systems following public pressure.
Several Giller Prize winners (Sarah Bernstein, Suzette Mayr, Omar El Akkad, Madeleine Thien, Sean Michaels, Lynn Coady, Johanna Skibsrud and Michael Ondaatje) stated in an open letter that “the only way to overcome this divisive period is to The profound turn at Canadian Arts is for the major sponsors of so many arts awards and organizations in Canada – banks like Scotiabank – to divest from companies whose products are currently used in mass murders.”
While the controversy surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict intervenes in the Canadian literary world, it also reveals deeply antagonistic ideas about the social role of literature.
Last year’s Giller Prize was troubled by protests. This year, two jurors withdrew and more than 300 members of the literary community signed a petition asking the Giller Foundation to cut ties not only with Scotiabank but also with Indigo Books.
Thien, who won the Giller Prize in 2016, requested to have no involvement with the prize after requests from previous Giller Prize winners to fund this year’s prize were rejected. She and El Akkad, the 2021 Giller winner, spoke out against the way the prize administration handled author calls.
How can a literary prize become a forum for political debate? The concept of literary authority and determining what the rules for a book’s success are are being deeply challenged by social networks and algorithms. Literary awards remain an important driver of book sales and writers’ reputations. More specifically, when there are awards, the awards are a way for writers to make a living.
It’s worth mentioning that in Canada, the Writers Guild of Canada’s latest earnings survey of members and other writers, based on 2017 earnings, shows an average net income from writing of 9,380 USD.
As English professor James English has pointed out, the binary opposition between art and commerce (are you a sellout or are you not) is not helpful for thinking about the logic of these solutions? literary reward. First, reputation is an abstract concept, similar to what makes us pay five times more for a branded T-shirt.
Literary awards function to determine an author’s worth without regard to that author’s commercial value, automatically conferring prestige. But what if the money that comes with the prize compromises its artistic integrity? And will the artist be harmed by the commercial success that follows the award? These are all questions that do not have clear answers.
Literary awards, moreover, are the perfect symbol of the difficult encounter between a book and its commercialization by bringing big ideas and poetic beauty down to earth.
Who sponsors the prize, and what political ideas is the person writing the cashing check associated with? Where do their loyalties lie? What is their accountability? We can also debate the racism or sexism of literary prize juries and whether they reproduce systemic inequality in the name of art.
Political controversies surrounding literary awards are a frequent occurrence. The awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to German writer Peter Handke in 2019 sparked accusations of genocide denial and being a supporter of extreme Serb nationalism.
At the other end of the spectrum, British writer John Berger gave half of the 1972 Booker Prize for his novel G. to the British Black Panthers.
According to the winners Giller wrote an open letter and other writers, writers have a responsibility not to participate in the public relations machine that is supporting Israel’s war in Gaza. For its part, the Giller Foundation claims that the prize is not a political tool.
Anne Michaels’ statement after the award was given spoke about the politics of art. “Everything I write is a form of witness – against war, against apathy, against all kinds of dementia.” She also wrote that each book carries “its own evidence… its own form of resistance and assertion,” and affirmed her solidarity with all other writers, as well as with booksellers and Canadian publisher.
This statement suggests a defense of art’s relative autonomy from social problems and a belief that its responsibility is to its community of readers and not to society as a whole. She also notes: “Not so long ago, less than 70 years ago – we lived in a country where only 14 Canadian novels were published in a year – fewer nationally than the longlist for the prize. this reward.”
These comments also suggest a form of print nationalism is creeping into Michaels’s argument, a view echoed by writer Stephen Marche. He sees the controversy surrounding Giller as a sign of the decline of the divisive left and that political polarization around cultural institutions is harmful to Canadian culture.
Michaels also draws attention to the fragility of a literary ecosystem, where Canadian literature struggles to be represented in the absence of a strong network of independent bookstores. Visibility is indeed an enormous challenge for Canadian writers (inside and outside Canada), and literary awards are, by definition, a means of visibility.
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Writer Ian Williams, winner of the 2019 Giller Prize, also adds another dimension to the debate, questioning the binary approach to these issues.
Each, in its own way, shows how literature depends on the material conditions that make it possible to write and publish books. While Michaels claims the right to bear witness to the horrors of the world through literature, detractors of sponsorship force us to reflect that there can be no truly free art if it is indirectly complicit in perpetuating violence.