The field of authors in the running for this year’s $100,000 Giller Prize has been whittled down to 12, including Quebec’s Éric Chacour. But one name is notably absent from the list: Scotiabank.
The major bank remains the prize’s main sponsor, but its name has been removed from the title, Elana Rabinovitch, executive director of the Giller Foundation, announced Wednesday.
The name change comes after protesters disrupted the 2023 ceremony to denounce the bank’s investment in an Israeli arms manufacturer.
“Ultimately, more than ever, we want to ensure that the award remains true to its purpose: to celebrate the best of Canadian fiction and to give voice to Canada’s best storytellers,” said Mr.me Rabinovitch in an email.
“For us, this means we have to make sure that the focus remains solely on the price and the art itself.”
Since last year’s protest, members of the literary community have been lobbying for the Giller Foundation to end its 20-year partnership with Scotiabank, as well as its financial relationships with other sponsors they say have ties to the Israeli military.
That includes Indigo, whose CEO Heather Reisman is the founder of the Hesig Foundation, which provides funding to so-called lone soldiers — people who join Israeli forces without family in the country.
Disappointment among activists
Two international judges from this year’s five-member jury resigned in July, and many authors – including former nominees for the prize – withdrew their names from the shortlist.
Jody Chan, a poet and organizer of CanLit Responds, the group that initiated the appeals to the Giller Foundation, said removing Scotiabank’s name from the prize does not address the writers’ concerns.
“This is very much in keeping with how the Giller Foundation has responded to authors over the past few months, trying to overcome bad publicity and sweeping authors’ requests under the rug instead of responding to them directly,” she said.
Jody Chan added that even though Mme Rabinovitch argued that the focus should be on authors and their art, with writers who signed a joint letter to the Giller Foundation calling for people to focus on Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
A Quebecer in the running
This year’s long list includes: What I know about youthe first novel by Quebec author Éric Chacour. Chacour’s work already won the Prix Fémina des lycéens last November.
Also on the list are British Columbian authors Anne Fleming for her novel Curiosities and Loghan Paylor for his novel The Cure for Drowningboth of which deal with issues of gender and sexuality at a time when such conversations were much less common.
Gender-related themes feature prominently in the longlist, and only two of the 12 finalists are men.
In addition to Eric Chacour, the other male author in the running is Conor Kerr for his novel Prairie Edge.
Among the selected authors, we also find the Toronto poet Anne Michaels for her novel Held ; Torontonian Deepa Rajagopalan for her collection of short stories Peacocks of Instagram ; Vancouver’s Caroline Adderson for her collection of short stories A Way to Be Happy and British Columbia-based author Shashi Bhat for her collection Death by a Thousand Cuts.
Other award contenders include: Corinna Chong of Kelowna, B.C., for her novel Bad Land ; Claire Messud of Massachusetts for the novel This Strange Eventful History ; Jane Urquhart, from Ontario, for her novel In Winter I Get Up at Night and Katherena Vermette, from Winnipeg, for her novel real ones.
More than 100 submissions
Although dozens of authors said they had asked their publishers not to submit their work for the prize, the Giller Foundation said Wednesday that the three remaining members of the jury had chosen from 112 submissions, a number comparable to 2017 and more than 2018.
That number, however, is lower than last year and the year before, a change the foundation attributes to a delay in book publishing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Giller Prize ceremony is scheduled for November 18 and will be broadcast on CBC and CBC Gem.