The Giller Prize of the future
The 2024 Giller Prize was finally awarded amid some posturing, bad faith and toddlerism from some of the previous winners, nominees and authors who optimistically suspected they might be nominated. (I highly recommend Gurwinder’s piece on Neo-Toddlerism to understand what been going on in culture.) I wrote about some of that previously, but the situation has escalated so badly between a handful of very activist pro-Palestinian previous winners and the administrators of the prize that one of them, Madeleine Thien, publicly demanded the Giller remove her name and picture from everything Giller-related. This is a very unusual request for memory-holing, and I am not entirely sure what it’s meant to achieve. Thien’s name is forever tied to the Giller win and Giller nominations and accolades; the year that Thien won, Scotiabank was presumably already involved in Elbit or the equivalent, Second Intifada was behind us, Israel the same state that it is today, with the very same IDF.
The award money, notably, has not been offered back in disgust by any of the protesting authors.
In the interest of full disclosure, Madeleine Thien was kind enough to blurb my second book, the novella All That Sang, and I really liked her book Simple Recipes. We hung out quite a bit around 2015-16. She had bravely taken a stand in favour of Steven Galloway being granted a fair trial by signing the UBC Accountable letter, but the pressure was so strong on the signatories that I believe she ended up withdrawing her name. I have noticed she has, wisely, not signed a single open letter since.
On the matter of Gillers and award funding in general, we disagree. Banks and investment companies and pension funds and government money (which is itself invested and goes through the cycles) don’t operate in Amish Country, Pennsylvania. And while you can pretty much count on a consensus that selling arms to Saudi Arabia is bad because this is a truly repressive country murdering its own citizens (I appreciated Michael Lista’s reporting on General Kinetics and the Griffin Prize) it will be much harder to argue that Israel, the pluralist (if flawed) representative democracy and the only majority-Jewish state is a uniquely bad actor in the Middle East and globally too. Sally Rooney doesn’t want her books translated into Hebrew and published in Israel, but she is perfectly fine to have them available in Chinese, Russian, you name the language. (I doubt that Iranian publishing is clamouring for Salley Rooney, but she’d be fine with a Farsi translation I’m sure.) That Israel is uniquely bad, really beyond the pale, and that it is committing genocide as we speak, and therefore any kind of investment or sales or arms procurement or scholarships for retired IDF soldiers or even any kind of cultural and academic connection puts one beyond the pale - is a point of high contention. This is a worldview, and a view of international relations, that is far from self-evident and that reasonable people disagree on.
So the author-activists are operating under two presumptions: 1) the pool of award money and sponsorship for CanLit and CanArt is abundant and we can refuse the unclean money and choose the clean enough money or even offer ourselves to fundraise (the authors offering to fundraise for the money that would replace the Scotiabank money was touching but completely detached from reality); it’s only a matter of replacing this particular money with some other money, laying around unused; and 2) Israel is uniquely bad and every connection with it should be questioned. Not Iran, not Russia, not the Saudis: Israel. Furthermore, no other conflict in the world is this important.
Another assumption is that 3) if I can afford to say no to award money, you can too. This will be hard to understand to many in CanLit who teach in university or have family money or partner money to complement their meagre writing income, but: there are authors who don’t. There are authors and artists who don’t have money on tap and can’t pick sources of income based on where they stand vis-a-vis a multigenerational conflict a world away. It’s incredible that such people exist, I know. To quote musician Brad Cherwin, whom I’ve recently interviewed for the Wholenote magazine:
A further assumption in evidence is that 4) Canadians will care. About where the past Giller winners stand on the Middle East. The Giller itself. The Canadian novel.
I’m here to remind the authors that nobody reads anymore, and that even students who come to elite Ivy League schools to study literature have difficulty finishing a book within a reasonable amount of time. Canadian fiction in particular is in an unenviable place. Canadians don’t read Canadian fiction. This is the battle of the 21 century: getting Canadian novel to matter (again). Getting Canadians interested in their own culture. I’ve said this before, but we are likely living the last decades of Canadian culture. The hour is later than we think. Canadian novel has lost hearts and minds and has lost media coverage and literary criticism too. Neither the Star nor the Globe review the Giller shortlist anymore.
So it is absolutely raving mad to me that Canadian authors would protest a CanLit book sponsorship. Some of them, granted, don’t live in Canada and due to the reading market shrinkage have moved to the US or gone back to the country of origin, so they may presume it won’t affect them in any significant way. A lot of Canadian authors themselves write straight for the US markets.
I expect the big glamourous award that is the Giller was originally instituted with the intention of promoting Canadian fiction, of building the infrastructure for it, of helping it last. What will make Canadians interested in their own fiction again? I am afraid the answer is not A Big Glamourous Award. It’s a much deeper problem, none of it caused by the administrators of the Gillers who have noble intentions.
So here’s my not-very-modest proposals on what can be done with Gillers.
The main award should be $20,000 or less, with the finalist awards at $5000 or less. Use the rest to endow an online magazine of literary criticism and book journalism. Contract the best people, not the people that publishers or fellow donors want or the art councils want. Keep it separate from the award itself. It is quite possible, and probably desirable, that the literary review magazine will review negatively some of the Giller shortlisted novels. It will be doing its own thing. Canadian media bosses distinctly fucked up when they abandoned arts journalism and criticism. The Spectator magazine, which was recently purchased by Paul Marshall for gajillion GBP, is a model how it could be done. Half of the magazine is arts reviews and book criticism, but not of any kind. They are reviews without fear or favour (a critical mass of them, at any rate). They are written by people who give a damn about their beat. Not only would this get the conversations going, but it would provide a source of income for a bunch of writers year-round.
Giller should be for people who are, roughly, Canadian. It should not be a welfare award for Americans or Brits who have once stepped on the Canadian soil or moved to Kingston to do their MA at Queen’s before clearing out for good. If an author lives and writes in the US for decades and has zero interest in setting their fiction anywhere vaguely Canadian, there’s nothing to talk about. The Big Three will push on you their most mediatized authors who write in globe-ish, and for American or global audience. Unless the jury is explicitly instructed to consider these kinds of things as well, I’m afraid the award will be played.
Never ever become predictable. CanLit has periodically favoured this or that genre or esthetic approach to the point of hegemony (hard childhood on a farm in the Prairies; lyrical inward looking novel about a woman approaching middle age; international political or family saga with very little to do with Canada… and so on). You don’t want to be downstream from that and reactive; you want to be on your own perch, autonomously observing the goings-on. There have been stretches of years when both the GG and the Giller shortlisted the same kind of books, sometimes literally the same book. You want to avoid that. You want to go for a mix of Booker and Goldsmith. I expect the jury nomination and the jury procedures is how this can be managed. One good recent development was the increasing number of non-Big Three publishers on the shortlists, but this didn’t necessarily mean books that are not Big Three-like. I also salute the appearance of a Quebec translation on the shortlist this year. More of that, please.
Jury should not be obliged by any kind of DEI mandate. Dutiful DEI lit is killing reading. (Apropos of nothing: the GG Literary Award for fiction just went to an indigenous author. The GGLA for non-fiction also went to an indigenous author, the son of a prominent TRC figure. One of the assessors for the non-fiction award was… the author who won the fiction GG. Am I crazy? It could be me. Maybe this is all perfectly normal.)
It’s good and right that some of the jury members are not Canadian. Yes I’m asking for a stricter geographical eligibility criteria, but foreigners in the jury absolutely ahoy.
If an author won once, it disqualifies her/him from being nominated again. You know it’s the right thing to do.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
And thank you Gillers for existing. But there are challenges ahead, and political protests will be the least of them.