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Front Burner Transcript for November 22, 2024

Host: Jayme Poisson

JAYME POISSON: Hi, I'm Jayme Poisson.

[Music: Theme]

JP: The Giller Prize has been the premier award in Canadian literature for decades now, a venue to celebrate authors known and unknown. Winning comes with a life-changing $100,000 prize, supercharged publicity, and book sales typically follow. It's the kind of national honour a writer can spend a lifetime chasing. But for the last year, the award has been overrun by a controversy that has split the world of Canadian literature. Last year's gala was interrupted by a series of demonstrations as protesters rushed the stage carrying signs which read 'Scotiabank Funds Genocide.' Protesters were later arrested and prosecuted. Now, what those protesters were objecting to is the fact that Scotiabank, who is the premier sponsor of the Giller Prize, is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in one of Israel's largest weapons manufacturers. Since that demonstration, hundreds of writers, editors and bookmakers have urged the Giller to decouple from Scotiabank and from all sponsors materially invested in the Israeli military settlements and weapons industries. For a brief time, it appeared as though Giller had listened. But earlier this week, the award went ahead, with Scotiabank still as its lead sponsor. A decision that led to a number of former winners of the award to pull their works from consideration, and led hundreds in the industry to commit to a wholesale boycott of the Giller Prize altogether. Some of them protested outside the security perimeter on Tuesday night at Toronto's Hyatt Hotel, where the gala was happening.

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AUTHOR/ORGANIZER JODY CHAN: I hope we can look around at everyone who's gathered here on the streets instead of in that room up there ... and know that we are reading these same words, that we are 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 have made it so.

JP: One of the writers who decided against attending this year's gala is the Canadian author David Bergen, who won the award in 2005. David has also been short- and longlisted a number of times since then, most recently in 2023. He's here with me today.

[Music: Theme]

JP: David, hi. Thank you so much for coming on to Front Burner.

DAVID BERGEN: Hi, Jayme. Thanks for having me.

JP: So this conversation will, of course, be about the controversy surrounding the Giller Prize about politics and literature. But let's just start with your relationship with the Giller Prize. You are one of the most storied writers in the country. You won the award in 2005 and have been shortlisted and longlisted since then, as I mentioned. And can you just talk to me about your relationship to the Giller and what it means as an institution in this country?

DAVID BERGEN: As you say, I did win the prize in 2005, and...my connections to the Giller Prize run quite deep. And I did write an op-ed about that and explained in there that when I did win the prize, my life as an author changed. I sold more books; I was feted. I think in the op-ed I also said I was hot stuff. I no longer think that, ha. And then I had more novels both longlisted and shortlisted. It's-- The Giller Prize has had a huge effect on the literary scene in Canada, started by Jack Rabinovitch. And as you say, it is one-- a prize that is chased after, which is an interesting concept. It left a mark on my life. And because it left that mark on my life, I-- when I wrote that op-ed and I decided to pull out of participating in the Giller, it was a big decision because it was a 20-year relationship that I had with the Giller, with the Giller Prize. And so it wasn't necessarily an easy decision, and-- but I thought it was a necessary decision given the complicity I felt, and what was direct complicity with the-- with Scotiabank and its investments in Elbit arms and with the HESEG Foundation and with Azrieli. So that's why I, that's why I chose to pull out.

JP: Yeah, we're going to get to that a little bit more in a few minutes. But last year's Giller Prize, it was hosted by Rick Mercer. It was carried on tape delay by CBC Television. And twice, proceedings were interrupted by protesters who rushed the stage and spoke about what they call the genocide in Palestine.

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PROTESTER: Scotiabank currently has a $500-million stake in Elbit Systems! Elbit Systems is supplying the Israeli military's genocide [ATTENDEE: Go away!] against the Palestinian people!

[an attendee boos]

PROTESTER: We will not be silent...

JP: This was cut from the television broadcast but was visible from the livestream being broadcast on YouTube. And we'll get into why some of that happened in a moment. But what was your reaction at the time?

DAVID BERGEN: Oh, I wasn't watching, but my daughter sent me a note saying, did you see what happened at the Giller Prize? There were protesters. And then in horror, she wrote, "And they were booed."

SOUNDCLIP

PROTESTER: ...military's genocide...

EVENT ATTENDEE: Go away!

PROTESTER: ...against Palestinian people!

[another attendee boos, more yelling for the protester to "Go away!"]

DAVID BERGEN: And so I tuned in and I looked at it and I went back to read what had happened. I was, um, I was not aware of the investment through Scotiabank in Elbit Found-- or Elbit arms. And I have to say, I naively was shocked. I felt very strongly that that's really, really bad. Again, I say naively because why would I expect anything different, especially coming from a bank? And so I recalled hearing a reader who had pulled out of the, out of submitting a book, and she said she had been at the Giller Prize that year -- that was last year -- and she was sitting there and the protesters came out, and her immediate emotion was fear because she had no idea what was going on. [JP: Hm.] And when she realized, when there was booing and stuff, and she realized that they were making a statement, she decided to leave the gala at that point. And she's been very strong in her convictions that it was wise of her to leave and it was the right thing to do. So I, too... I obviously wasn't there; I didn't experience fear. But the interruption, I thought, was... of course, these were all young people. And of course, what do we-- you know, the young people are always doing things like this because that's what young people do. And I'd admire, I admire them. Interestingly, one of the protesters I learned later was a daughter of friends of mine, which was another connection that I had to the protests.

[music]

JP: We've talked about the boos, you mentioned the boos. Were you surprised by that? You know, people talk about often how literature has so often been a cipher for the political. Some of the books being honoured that very day were explicitly political and progressive. And yet, those in attendance largely comprised of those people. And the industry reacted, at least some, with a kind of contempt. And what did you make of that?

DAVID BERGEN: I agree. I agree that that-- well, booing, I think, was a natural sort of obviously just an impulsive response of their reaction to what was going on. I had a sense, and I can talk about this word later, that they were inconvenienced in some way; that this was a disruption of their party and how dare young people walk in with posters and placards and screaming. Basically, foist upon them a different idea of what was going on in the world than what was going on in that room. And I believe there's a-- that showed a clear division of power. That there was... And I think we saw that at the protests the other night that you referred to. That you had the people outside, many of whom are writers, and the other people inside, some of whom were writers. And so you have the powerful people inside, and then you have the less powerful people outside. And I think that, to go back to the inconvenience, I think that people who are comfortable with what they're doing, don't want to be faced with questions as to what's going on in the world. And in this case, the slaughter of the Gazans.

JP: A lot of this that we're talking about today comes down to the Giller Prize's premier sponsor, Scotiabank. Although I do want to talk to you more about Indigo in a moment. As you've talked about, Scotiabank was invested to the tune of half a billion dollars in the Israeli weapons producer Elbit Systems, one of the largest-- Israel's largest weapons manufacturers.

SOUNDCLIP

CBC TIKTOK REPORTER: Why is Scotiabank's mutual fund the largest foreign shareholder in an Israeli company that makes weapons? That company is Elbit Systems, and its weapons technology has been used inside Gaza and in the occupied West Bank. Israel's use of Elbit-made drones on civilians has been documented. In 2014, an Israeli airstrike killed four boys who were playing on a beach in Gaza. The missiles were fired from a drone made by Elbit Systems, according to a military police report obtained by The Intercept. And Scotiabank's stake in Elbit isn't small.

JP: And this is what the protesters last year were responding to. But shortly thereafter, throughout the year, hundreds of writers and bookworkers across the country mounted a pressure campaign pushing for action. Initiatives were started, which you are a part of, like No Arms in the Arts and CanLit Responds. And this collective effort did appear to lead to Scotiabank to divest, in part, from Elbit Systems. And for a time it appeared as though the Giller was going to end its commercial partnership with Scotiabank altogether. Former winners of the prize have said publicly that they were led to believe that this was imminent. But instead, the relationship continued. The Giller said in part, quote, "Following a thorough review and deep consultation with members of the literary community, the Giller Foundation Board has agreed that our partnership with Scotiabank will continue." And what have you made of all of this, of the Giller's continued reliance on this corporate sponsor?

DAVID BERGEN: I find it interesting that they claimed to have had conversations with the literary community. If I'm-- I'm not aware of that. I'm not saying they had to talk to me, but I'm not aware of other writers that they spoke to who would have said, Yeah, let's keep going with Scotiabank. But at a very basic level, they missed such an opportunity, I believe, to do a volte-face; to turn around and say, Yes, we will not be complicit in the destruction of the West Bank and of Gaza and now Lebanon. And we will make a change, we will look for other sponsors if possible. I know that in some conversations with the Giller Foundation they said, if we let go of Scotiabank, we will no longer have the Giller Prize. Well, my sense is that they wouldn't have the Giller Prize as it is now, and as it was, where you have five city tours and you have the gala and you have a lot of money poured into it from Scotiabank. My sense is that there could have been so much hope, they could have so much change. And a statement made by the Giller Foundation to say, Listen, we're not going to be complicit, we're going to change it. We're going to have a smaller prize. We may not have $100,000, we may not have any prize. The thing is, is if you win the Giller, you are going to get book sales, just as if you win the Prix Goncourt, which gives you 10 euros. The resulting sales and books are exponential. And you don't need that initial money to... So the prize itself was established. And didn't need to say, We have to hang on to Scotiabank, we have to hang on to HESEG, we have to hang on to our other funders who are complicit. So I see it as a tremendously missed opportunity.

JP: And just, you mentioned HESEG. So writers like you have also objected to two additional sponsors of the Giller: Indigo Books, who are the principal funders of the HESEG Foundation, who provides grants to foreigners who enlist in the Israeli military. And the Israeli Foundation, which is the charitable arm of one of Israel's largest real estate companies, which currently continues to conduct business in the occupied West Bank. And are you of the mind that a mainstream Canadian literary organization should be in the business with Indigo Books and the Israeli Foundation?

DAVID BERGEN: Well, let's talk first about the HESEG Foundation. It sponsors lone, what they call lone soldiers. And as far as Azrieli goes, the fact that they're supporting the settlers in the West Bank who are deliberately breaking into the Palestinian homes and chasing them out and breaking their things and taking away their orchards and stuff like that, to me is... I just don't want to be connected to that. And I don't think the Giller should want to be connected to that.

[music]

JP: As we've talked about, you made the decision not to attend this year. You were one of a number of high-profile winners of the award to do so. You've written about the fact that you were compelled to make that decision based on the fact that you grew up in the Mennonite Christian tradition. Now, the Mennonites have been central to protests in both Canada and the United States for the last few centuries. They were some of the early white abolitionists. They've also been on the front lines of the antiwar movement through the years and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. And can you talk to me about how the Mennonite tradition has informed your politics and life and writing through the years? And to what end does it continue to inform your politics today?

DAVID BERGEN: This is a really tough question because it's... heh, I've always avoided calling myself a Mennonite writer. And now all of a sudden I'm leaning back on my Mennonite roots to inform my position here. As I stated in my op-ed, my grandfather in Russia was a conscientious objector. My father in the Second World War was the same, a conscientious objector. We were raised with passages about peace and turning the other cheek, that sort of thing. So that was, that's always been a part of my upbringing. And as I say, I've said before, that that's one of the vestiges, one of the few vestiges of my upbringing. I don't consider myself to be a religious Mennonite in that way. But that being said, I've been educated in that vein. And so for me to participate in any way in violence, in war, even at a distance, is-- it's very deeply ingrained in me that that's just something that we do not do. Now, some people might say, well, that's very naive. Who's going to fight for you? Well, that's not for me to decide. I have decided to take that stance and I will stand by that stance. And I'd rather turn my guns into plowshares.

JP: Despite the fact that dozens of mainstream writers in this country made the decision not to submit their works to the Giller this year, and hundreds of bookworkers committed themselves to a boycott, there were, of course, still authors who did submit their work. In the eyes of many in the industry, this has essentially been seen as like a picket line that was crossed, right? This year's winner of the Giller was Anne Michaels, who won for her book Held, which is rooted in themes like war and loss. And after the event, Michaels released a statement, which, though not once mentioning Gaza by name, seemed to clearly gesture towards the controversy and her participation in the event. She talked about why it's important for writers to be witnesses against war, amnesia and indifference, and ask questions like, quote, "When do we begin to count the dead?" What might you say to Canadian writers who did decide to participate in the Giller, who did not feel the sponsor controversy to be prohibitive, I guess?

DAVID BERGEN: Just to go back to the speech. I don't-- I wasn't there, obviously. I didn't hear everything that was said, but I don't even know if the word Palestinian or Gaza was mentioned that evening. It may have been alluded to in a sort of distant way, in the sense of speaking for the dead. But that, to me, was again, a missed opportunity to state what was basically the elephant in the room. To the authors who decided to participate, I, I cannot speak for them. I can only say that to... if you are participating in the Giller Prize, [indistinct] in the form that it has right now, and you also voice support for Palestine, is to, is to be... well, split, obviously. But it is also to actively contribute to art washing, which means it sort of presents a facade of a diversity of opinions. And I think we have to move beyond that facade and say, well, what is happening here? Again, that's my stance. I'm not going to point my finger at those authors who decided to participate, who decided to enter that room and to submit their books. What's interesting to me is that the collective I'm a part of, No Arms in the Arts and boycott the-- the Giller boycott, that I, I'm a single voice, and a single voice right now on the radio with you. But that single voice is very minimal, and it requires many voices. And the fact that 40 authors decided not to submit books is a huge thing. And the collective is much stronger than the individual. I know there was one author I spoke with who pulled his book, but did not join the collective. But [inaudible] anyway, and the Giller Foundation kept coming back at him, Won't you submit, won’t you submit? And the fact is, they need us. They need writers. Without writers, without novelists, without our books, the Giller would not exist.

[music]

JP: I don't want to put you on the spot here, but are you disappointed in any legacy authors in this country that, you know, maybe decided not to say anything here or that have remained quiet?

DAVID BERGEN: I'm curious. Um, I'm curious...It was hard for me. And so I imagine it's hard for all. Because over the last 25 years or so, or maybe 30 years, yeah, we've been given this sense that the Giller is the be-all and the end-all. And that brings us to the whole idea of prizes and what they mean and are they the best thing for writers, and why would one book be better than 150 books, you know? But that's just the way it's set up. And perhaps the setup is wrong, even though I benefited from it. But the writers who protested, the writers who withdrew for the most part were young, were the first-time novelists. Often writers of colour, interestingly. And it's interesting to me that the more established writers were the ones that seemed to be quiet.

JP: Right. Fair for me to say that the ones that withdrew in some ways had the most to lose?

DAVID BERGEN: I suppose. I suppose. I mean, another way of looking at it is that the people with less to lose are less afraid to lose it, because they don't have anything to lose. [JP: Right.] I mean, the young writers, especially artists, have seen decimation of public funding for the arts, the near impossibility of getting teaching jobs, let alone getting money to make your work. And that has a lot to do with their courage, because they, they are sort of flapping in the wind. And I know that when one writer who went for an interview who had pulled out and was a protester, she said that she was in an interview and they asked her about her activism. And that immediately shut down her possibility of getting even a further interview for that job. So it's really... they're very brave. I found the young to be very brave and maybe the old, the elderly, could learn from them.

JP: I want to play you a clip. It is from former Giller winner Madeleine Thien, who had previously announced a boycott of the Giller, which included a request that the prize remove all use of her likeness and work from any related materials. She was announced as the winner of the Writers' Trust [DAVID: Yes.] award, and she announced that she would be forfeiting all of her $25,000 winnings to the organizations the Woodcock Fund for Canadian writers in need, the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, and the Lebanese Red Cross. And just let me, let me play you what she said.

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MADELEINE THIEN: This beautiful prize has given me another kind of gift: the ability to return the prize money to the world in ways that my own resources would not have allowed. I will be donating it in its entirety.

JP: And what was your reaction to that?

DAVID BERGEN: I texted her. I said -- this is what I said, if you don't mind if I read it?

JP: Please, I would love that.

DAVID BERGEN: I said, 'Congratulations, Maddy. Just read about your award and your acceptance speech. How brave and generous of you. You are acting in the face of so much silence. With great admiration, David.'

JP: Did she write back?

DAVID BERGEN: So that was-- No, she hadn't written back yet. I think she's a bit busy. We have been in contact. We were in contact over a previous article that was written about us as well.

[music]

JP: You have written about your own personal connection to the Palestinian people as well. Your sister, I believe, lived and worked in--

DAVID BERGEN: She's doing well, yeah.

JP: --the occupied West Bank for seven years, and made some deep friendships in the occupied territories along the way. And as I understand it, there's one person in particular she has been in regular contact with over the last year or so. And can you talk to me about how formative that experience was for her, you and your family?

DAVID BERGEN: Oh, very formative. I have to say, Jayme, that this-- my sense of action, responsibility to Gaza and the West Bank doesn't come out of the last year. It's always been there since back in 2005, I mean-- and where I started to become more aware of what was going on. And in conversations with my sister-in-law and her family, it was very clear to me, the stories that she would tell, that there was... there was a tremendous need for action, for making it clear that this was happening in the world. And I don't think it was clear. It wasn't clear until a year ago when there was sort of this awakening of the general population as to what was... that there was a place called Gaza and that they were in a sort of open-air prison. And so I do have to say that my letters with them, my phone conversations, and now in Winnipeg my face-to-face conversations, are very-- have informed me. They've educated me. And so I can't, I can't ignore the stories that are told. And just one little story -- I said in my op-ed that flour cost $100 a bag. Well, it's now, in the last week, gone up to $280 a bag in Gaza. [JP: Wow.] And inevitably, people are fighting over those bags of flour [JP: Yeah.] because, because that's what they need. So it's, so yes, it's definitely been... I have been influenced by the people I've spoken to.

JP: I wonder, if you don't mind, could we end today on kind of a meta question about the role of a writer in a society. There have been writers who believe themselves to have no particular social responsibility and others who feel it necessary that their work reflect the times, that it stands for something greater than themselves, right? And when you are thinking about the role of the writer, do you think it's a pursuit that comes with a sense of social responsibility? And if so, how do you define it? Like, what is it to you?

DAVID BERGEN: What I'm doing with you today, is very different than what I do when I write my novels. When I write my novels, I write stories that probe at questions, that look at characters who are banging up against something. But I'm-- I feel what I'm doing today has a sort of a black and white quality to it. And I don't-- that's not what my novels do. I think, I think my novels have a moral complexity to them and they ask questions, but my characters aren't necessarily all beautiful characters and they're not necessarily all likable. And so I'm-- when I write my novels, I'm not entering the story as I'm going to solve a political equation, I'm going to make a statement, I'm going to teach something to someone. That's, no. That's not my interest at all in writing novels. So the difficulty, of course, for me, is I do believe novels can reveal something to us. It can make us-- give us catharsis. It can give us a sense of the other. I think that's terribly important. And unfortunately, so many men in the world don't read novels, and I wish they did, because maybe they'd have a sense, better sense of the other. So, when I make a statement like I am with you now, it's very different. And I'm not sure whether I am-- I don't think I am political, even though I don't know exactly what that word means when I'm writing. But my novels, like my last novel took place in Ukraine and during the Russian Revolution. I mean, it was-- someone said, Oh, you wrote an anti-war novel. And I thought to myself, did I? That was never my intent when I wrote it. But that must have come out as I was writing the novel. And my own sensibilities came out, and the futility of war came out, and the chaos and the anguish and the loss and the grief that came through. But that wasn't what I-- I didn't sit down at the computer and say, I'm going to write this down, as that person perceived it to be. I'm not sure if I've answered your question, but...

JP: I think that was a great answer. David Bergen, thank you very much for being here.

DAVID BERGEN: Thank you, Jayme.

[Music: Theme]

JP: All right. That is all for this week. Front Burner was produced this week by Joyita Sengupta, Matthew Amha, Matt Meuse, Allie Jaynes and Kieran Oudshoorn. Sound design is by Mackenzie Cameron and Marco Luciano. Music is by Joseph Shabason. Our senior producer is Elaine Chau. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Lokos. I'm Jayme Poisson. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next week.

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Politics, Gaza and money collide at The Giller Prize - Transcript

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