Last week, 20 authors committed to withdrawing from the Giller Prize and related events until the Giller Foundation drops its partnerships with Scotiabank, the Azrieli Foundation, and Indigo. Following its release, 15 more signed on, including 2024 fiction authors, past winners and past nominees.

2024 jurors Dinaw Mengestu and Megha Majumdar have also withdrawn since.

The statement forced the Giller Foundation to release their only substantive response to demands from the literary community after 9 months of virtual silence - 9 months of a genocide that medical journal The Lancet now calculates having a death toll as high as 186,000.

In their statement, the Giller Foundation recommitted to their Scotiabank partnership:

“While we respect all viewpoints that have been shared, we are confident in the integrity of Scotiabank and in our partnership. And while we appreciate the range of views that have been shared, the foundation is not a political tool.”

Despite claiming to stand “firmly for freedom of speech and the right to free expression,” the statement doesn’t address revelations from Josiah Neufeld’s Walrus reporting revealing:

• How the Giller Prize told author Sarah Bernstein that audience members who asked questions about Palestine would be censored during her Giller Book Club session
• The ominous emails sent to publishers submitting books for Prize consideration warning their authors away from political advocacy
• That it was Giller organizers themselves who pushed for criminal charges against last year's Giller Prize disruptors

What is clear is that the Gillers are a political tool, and a very valuable one for companies laundering their image after investing in arms and oppression. These calls for divestment from the literary world aren’t about achieving some sort of moral purity, or taking a rhetorical stand. Scotiabank remains the largest foreign shareholder in Elbit Systems. Indigo’s leadership—Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman—continue to subsidize IOF “lone soldiers” through their HESEG charity. The Azrieli Group continues to do business on West Bank settlements deemed illegal under international law.

Critics, including the Giller Foundation themselves, will try to paint our collective action as ineffectual, divisive, or worse. But we are guided by the calls of Palestinian liberation movements worldwide to target material stakeholders in Israel’s genocidal project

By identifying the points of leverage in our industries, culture workers are working to defang, delegitimize, and defund corporations fuelling Palestinian death.

24 authors have withdrawn their books from consideration, 11 Giller-affiliated authors have withdrawn from future Giller publicity or promotion, and 2 out of their 5 jury members have resigned. If the Giller Prize loses its claim to representing “the best of Canlit,” what remains of it? Sponsor logos and canapés?