On Monday night, the gala for the Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious literary award, took place at Toronto’s Park Hyatt hotel. The Giller Foundation has been dogged by controversy for over a year due to its corporate sponsors’ ties to Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, the Israeli Defense Forces, and an Israeli real estate company with investments in West Bank settlements.
Ahead of this year’s gala, more than 200 Canadian authors refused to submit their books for Giller Prize consideration or participate in any Giller-related publicity until the Foundation committed to dropping their partnerships with these corporate sponsors.
The 2024 award was won by Anne Michaels. Michaels’s speech, the text of which was subsequently posted to social media, has been met with significant criticism from pro-Palestinian activists and members of the wider Canadian literary community.
On the street outside the Park Hyatt on Monday night, dozens of Canadian authors and book workers formed a picket line and staged a “Boycott Giller” counter-gala.
One of those authors, the poet and organizer Jody Chan, delivered the following remarks:
My name is Jody and I’m an organizer with CanLit Responds, No Arms in the Arts, and Toronto Writers Against the War on Gaza.
Before we leave tonight’s Boycott Giller counter-gala, I hope we can look around—at every author and book worker gathered here in Toronto; at the hundreds more gathered across so-called Canada, reading from these same pages, orienting to the same horizon of Palestinian liberation—and know that another kind of literary world, one that doesn’t traffic in blood money and self-interest, but in solidarity and collective power, already exists—because we, the people, make it so.
This year, the Giller closed its gala doors on everyone but literary and corporate elites; so we brought our counter-gala to their door and to the streets. They quietly cancelled their cross-country finalists’ tour, instead of facing authors and readers who have been calling them to account for their genocidal sponsors Scotiabank, Indigo Books, and the Azrieli Foundation for over a year; so we took their place, in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Montréal, Fredericton, and Halifax.
We have built so much together. And still—amidst Israel’s ongoing now-43-day siege of north Gaza, its targeting of journalists, artists, writers; every school and hospital destroyed; the murders of children, the hundreds of thousands of martyrs; the waves of massacres in Beit Lahia, Jabalia, Beirut, and South Lebanon in the last 24 hours alone—we can do so much more. We must.
At our fourth No Arms in the Arts book club several weeks ago, one of our community members, a Palestinian writer, organizer, friend, and comrade, reminded us that, as writers, we have a responsibility to throw whatever we have—markers, stones, words, weapons, bodies—against the forces of Zionism and imperialism and settler colonialism.
So here, today, we throw our labour into the gears of the death machine that is the so-called Canadian literary sector.
We say no, my work will not be used to legitimize or normalize the intertwining of arts funding and arms funding.
We recognize that as writers we are cultural workers, not just content creators, and that means that we have collective power in the places that we work.
We commit to building that collective power and upholding this boycott until all of our demands are met.
We learn commitment and discipline not from the soulless neoliberal conditioning that turns radicalism into a brand rather than a practice, that tells us the only way we can make change as writers is to “witness” or to “speak out” as individuals, but from the examples of revolutionary writers, who are also some of our greatest organization-builders, who have sacrificed everything for their people.
We learn from Ghassan Kanafani, who said to his niece Lamees the day before they were both martyred by Zionist forces in 1972, when she asked him if he would ever focus more on his writing than his revolutionary activities, “I write well because I believe in a cause, in principles. The day I leave these principles, my stories will become empty.”
We learn from George Jackson, who wrote more than fifty years ago from prison, “Understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved… Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”
As writers we are trained in description and critique, in imagination. But what we need more of is practice. Practice withholding our labour, practice talking to each other, practice organizing our own alternative spaces that aren’t beholden to corporate sponsors who profit from producing death, practice giving something up to help each other survive.
Every campaign we wage together is practice. It goes beyond any one prize, any one sponsor.
We’ve fielded a lot of critiques since this campaign started, some genuine, many in bad faith from elites now attending the Giller gala across the street—for expanding our targets to include Indigo Books and the Azrieli Foundation, for not trying to make slow institutional change from the inside, for not trying to find a third way, a more “pragmatic” way.
To that, I want to share the words of the political theorist Joy James, who writes, “If you’re going to use the term ‘pragmatic’ to discipline radicals, my preference is that you say nothing…If you want to discipline rebels then pony up something tangible: raise bail funds, pay for their attorneys, feed their kids while they are inside, or try to get them out. You cannot lecture risk-taking people about being politically ‘infantile’ out of your fear or out of your accumulations…There’s nobody we admire who is pragmatic… Everybody could have been ‘pragmatic.’ But if they were, we would not have any ancestors.”
I want to do away with this false binary between writers and organizers. Culture alone, the work we do on the page, will not be enough. Reasoning with or trying to reform the cultural institutions that prop up this settler colonial state will not be enough. We have to be willing, at the very least, to take risks for each other, to relinquish the false accolades, the fancy galas, all of them the oppressor’s incentives to keep us from actively building solidarity with each other.
So talk to each other—talk to your friends who have also added their names to the boycott about what more you can do together. Talk to your friends who haven’t added their name to the boycott, ask them why, share your own reasons for doing so.
If you want to get more involved with CanLit Responds and the No Arms in the Arts campaign, come talk to one of the organizers or reach out to us at authorsrespond@gmail.com. You can also follow us at wawog_to on Instagram or canlitresponds.ca.
We need all of us.
We will not retreat.
We will pound stone upon stone.
And in our lifetimes we will see a free Palestine.