Giller Prize juror warns award in peril over sponsor Scotiabank subsidiary’s ties to Israeli weapons company

With the Scotiabank Giller Prize board of directors set to meet Wednesday afternoon, a jury member for this year’s prize believes the prestigious literary award is in peril over its corporate bank affiliation.

Ethiopian-American novelist Dinaw Mengestu told The Globe and Mail there is strong opposition within the Canadian literary community toward the country’s richest award for fiction because of the investment of a Scotiabank subsidiary in Israel-based defence company Elbit Systems Ltd.

“I think the damage to the reputation that is happening now is already going to be difficult to recover from, and it is growing week by week,” Mr. Mengestu said.

The annual Giller Prize for Canadian novels and short stories was created in 1994 by Montreal businessman Jack Rabinovitch. Scotiabank has been the Giller Prize’s corporate title sponsor since 2005.

Filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission show that Scotiabank subsidiary 1832 Asset Management had a 2.5-per-cent stake in Elbit at the end of March, down from 4.2 per cent at the end of 2023. Scotiabank declined to comment for this story.

On Nov. 13, 2023, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto, anti-Israel protesters disrupted the televised Giller ceremony by mounting the stage while holding signs reading “Scotiabank funds genocide.” Master of ceremonies Rick Mercer attempted to grab one of the signs and some audience members booed. Others, though, walked out as the protesters were escorted from the room and later arrested.

Elana Rabinovitch, executive director of the Giller Prize, issued a statement the next day saying the protesters showed “disrespect to Canadian authors and their literary achievements that were made throughout the year.”

That Giller officials have not publicly addressed the title sponsorship of the $100,000 prize since then is problematic, according to Mr. Mengestu. He is the director of the Center for Ethics and Writing at Bard College in upstate New York and vice-president of PEN America, which champions the freedom to write.

“Silence becomes an invitation for more forceful response from people,” he said. “Writers will come under pressure, and the prize should not let writers be in that difficult position.”

Ms. Rabinovitch, daughter of the late Mr. Rabinovitch, issued a statement to The Globe on Tuesday.

“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,” the statement read. It went on to say that the Giller Prize would “provide any update that we have” after a Giller board meeting on Wednesday, adding, “we ask that people not construe our silence for endorsement of the status quo. Systems take time to dismantle.”

After last fall’s disrupted gala, Canadian authors launched an online letter in support of the protesters. Among the more than 2,000 signees are Sarah Bernstein, who accepted the 2023 Giller Prize for her novel Study for Obedience, and Erum Shazia Hasan, longlisted for her debut novel We Meant Well.

Both authors withdrew from recent online Giller Book Club events. They later participated in an online book club organized by No Arms in the Arts, a Toronto-based campaign targeting Scotiabank-sponsored arts programs. Ms. Bernstein addressed the issue of arts funding, and the ways writers are paid, “and the ways we are necessarily enmeshed in these systems that we don’t necessarily ethically want to be involved with.”

The Montreal-born, Scotland-based author said that while it was a “difficult decision” to pull out of her Giller Book Club event, she was told that questions from the audience in reference to Palestinians or related protests “might be censored.”

Other signatories to the letter in support of protesters at the Giller Prize ceremony include past winners Omar El Akkad, David Bergen and Sean Michaels, and former jury members including Casey Plett and Waubgeshig Rice.

Mr. Mengestu believes the Giller Prize’s standing is tied to its relationship with the authors. “If you begin to lose the trust and support of the writers who make these prizes viable, and the writers begin to feel like the association with the prize is either against their own values or damaging to their reputation or what they believe is the fundamental role of literature, the legitimacy of the prize quickly begins to come under pressure,” he said.

As a member of this year’s five-person jury panel, Mr. Mengestu receives $10,000. He says the Giller Prize can and needs to exist without Scotiabank.

“I’m not Canadian. I’ll never get this prize, and I’ll probably never have any affiliation with it after this year. My engagement with the Giller Prize is because I’m a writer and I feel deeply about what these awards can do for our culture.”