Giller Prize drops Scotiabank from its name amid ongoing controversy

As the Giller Foundation announced Wednesday its long list of 12 nominees in contention for the $100,000 annual prize, the organization quietly dropped Scotiabank from its title. 
The Canadian financial institution remains the lead sponsor of the award, but its name has been removed from the prize title, said Elana Rabinovitch, executive director of the Giller Foundation.
The rebranding follows months of controversy surrounding Scotiabank’s investment in the Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems and comes amid an ongoing campaign calling on arts organizations like the Giller Foundation to distance themselves from the financial institution. 
Scotiabank’s asset management subsidiary has an investment in Elbit.
“Ultimately, more than ever, we want to ensure the prize stays true to its purpose: to celebrate the best in Canadian fiction and to give the stage to Canada’s best storytellers,” Rabinovitch said in an email to The Canadian Press. “For us, that means ensuring the focus remains solely on the prize and the art itself.”
Last year’s Giller Prize ceremony in Toronto saw anti-war protesters disrupting the gala and calling out Scotiabank financial ties with Elbit Systems. The Israel-based weapons producer has been previously accused of manufacturing cluster munitions, a deadly weapon that more than 100 countries, including Canada, have banned. 
The lead-up to this year’s ceremony, scheduled for Nov. 18, has also been fraught. Activists and members of the literary community have continued to pressure the Giller Foundation to end its 20-year partnership with Scotiabank, as well as financial relationships with other sponsors they say have ties to Israel’s army. 
Earlier this summer, dozens of authors — including past prize winners — withdrew their works from consideration in protest. Indian novelist Megha Majumdar and Ethiopian-American author Dinaw Mengestu, the two international judges on the Giller Prize’s five-person jury, also resigned from their roles over the organization’s refusal to cut ties with its lead sponsor.
Despite the Giller Foundation’s attempt to distance itself from its lead sponsor and turn the page on the controversy, some activists and members of the literary community say the organization’s rebranding doesn’t go far enough and that the prize must fully end its partnership with the bank. 
“The change of the prize’s title is a PR stunt, intended to reduce outcry,” said Canadian author Avik Jain Chatlani, who previously withdrew his debut novel “This Country Is No Longer Yours” from consideration for the prize. “The money still comes from Scotiabank, which is heavily invested in Elbit Systems, despite knowing all the atrocities that this Israeli firm has committed against Palestinians.
“This whole prize is structured around art-washing the genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people as a whole,” Chatlani added.
Comic artist and illustrator Michael DeForge, an organizer with the activist group No Arms in the Arts, told the Star that if the Giller Prize wants to focus on authors, “they should listen to the demands those authors are making of them: to cut ties with companies materially supporting Israel’s siege on Gaza. It’s insulting to think the literary community they claim to be a part of would settle for simply removing Scotiabank from the title of the prize.”
The Giller Foundation previously stated it had no plans to drop its lead sponsor amid the mounting pressure from high-profile authors. The organization said it conducted a “thorough review” of its partnership and consulted members of the literary community, with its board ultimately concluding that the sponsorship will continue.
Amid the protests, however, Scotiabank’s asset management subsidiary has quietly cut its stake in Elbit Systems. In mid-2023, it was the third largest shareholder with a 5.04 per cent stake in the company. Currently, it owns a roughly 1.44 per cent stake, valued at $113 million, according to an August filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The bank has insisted that the campaign against it did not influence the decisions of portfolio managers, but activists have framed the partial divestment to be as a result of their efforts. 
André Forget, a Toronto writer whose debut novel “In the City of Pigs” was longlisted for the Giller Prize in 2022, is among the group of Canadian authors who have pledged to boycott this year’s prize due to Scotiabank’s ties to Elbit Systems. Though Forget does not have a book eligible for this year’s Giller, he confirmed to the Star that he plans to withhold future books from consideration until Scotiabank divests from Elbit Systems or the Giller Prize ends its relationship with Scotiabank.
Forget said that while he values what the Giller has done for Canadian literature, he is “troubled” by its ties to the controversial weapons manufacturer and by the way that organizers dealt with protesters at the gala last year. “I thought that the young people who stood up in protest of Scotiabank should have been treated with far more respect than they were,” he said.
This year’s long list includes British Columbia authors Anne Fleming for her novel “Curiosities” and Loghan Paylor for their novel “The Cure for Drowning,” both of which deal with questions of gender and sexuality in eras when those conversations were much less common.
Gender themes feature prominently on the long list and only two of the 12 finalists are men.
They are Montreal’s Éric Chacour for his novel “What I Know About You,” which was translated from the original French, and Edmonton’s Conor Kerr for his novel “Prairie Edge.”
Also in contention are Toronto poet Anne Michaels for her novel “Held,” Toronto-based Deepa Rajagopalan for her short-story collection “Peacocks of Instagram,” Vancouver-based Caroline Adderson for her short-story collection “A Way to Be Happy” and B.C.-based Shashi Bhat for her collection “Death by a Thousand Cuts.”
Rounding out the list are Kelowna, B.C.‘s Corinna Chong for her novel “Bad Land,” Massachusetts-based Claire Messud for the novel “This Strange Eventful History,” Ontario’s Jane Urquhart for her novel “In Winter I Get Up at Night” and Winnipeg’s katherena vermette for her novel “real ones.”
Though several dozen authors said they had directed their publishers not to submit their works for the prize, the Giller Foundation said Wednesday the three remaining jury members picked from 112 submissions, on par with 2017 and more than 2018.
The number is, however, down from last year and the year before, a change the foundation attributes to a backlog of book publications in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Editor’s note – Sept. 5, 2024
This story has been updated to provide more context about Scotiabank’s relationship to Elbit