From Alice Munro to the Giller Prize: The controversies that rocked the CanLit world this year

The Canadian literary world faced many controversies this year, from the funding of the prestigious Giller Prize to Alice Munro's tainted legacy. These revelations have created fractures in the CanLit world and forced authors to re-think how they interact with literary institutions. 

Today on Commotion, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud speaks with journalists Michelle Cyca and Josh O'Kane to discuss the controversies and how they're changing the CanLit world. 

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Josh, how would you characterize the state of Canadian literature just based on the reporting that you've done this year? 

Josh: There's no surprise to me that authors want to question the institutions that underpin their own sector's biggest fiction prize. But what's interesting is that we're not seeing a clean, two-sided rift. We're seeing authors make it plain that based on Scotiabank's subsidiary 1832 Asset Management's disproportionately large stake in the arms manufacturer Elbit Systems [an Israeli weapons manufacturer], they're willing to boycott the Giller Prize. Others, including some past winners, have raised their voices against the prize as funding from Elbit, but didn't sign on to the very big CanLit response letter that is at the centre of this Giller crisis, if you want to call it that. That's in part because that letter did seek further demands from the Gillers that enter more muddy territory for some of those authors, including requesting it to end its partnership with Indigo, which is both the country's biggest bookseller, but also has owners who have a relationship with funding Israeli soldiers.

A lot of people are quite frustrated at the owners of Indigo, including Heather Reisman, who works very closely with a charity that supports lone Israeli soldiers. You also can't avoid Indigo. There are a lot of communities that don't have local bookstores, but do have an Indigo. I spoke with some authors earlier this year, especially the day that the CanLit response letter came out. And people were like, "We can't pull our books from Indigo, but we can at least raise our voice and say 'We don't like this connection.'" Which I find is quite interesting because you have the more cynical response to that, [which] has been from a lot of people: "Well, why don't you tell Indigo to stop stocking your book?" You can't necessarily do that, but, what they are saying is that they want to at least raise their voice and say that this is something that they don't like. 

Then you've got a few folks who have said that all of this is overblown. And perhaps what might be the biggest camp of all in this rift is you have a lot of established authors not saying anything. As others have put it, that may be because they don't want to wade in because of the professional risks. 

Elamin: Yeah. The idea of the number of prominent authors who have not said anything in either direction has been really interesting.

We've not really heard Margaret Atwood talk about this, Louise Penny, Michael Ondaatje, they're not really weighing in on all of this. So when you consider the idea that this is this defining moment that has left literature changed for the year, do we need to still insert the caveat that our biggest authors have been sitting on the sidelines for this one? 

Michelle: To Michael Ondaatje's credit, he was one of [eight] past prize winners that sent a letter in September urging the Giller Prize to cut ties with Scotiabank, so he's used his voice for that. But when you're thinking about someone like Margaret Atwood, I think there's kind of an existential question about whether you can achieve that level of commercial success without being broadly palatable to the largest number of people. 

Elamin: Whoa! That's a big statement, Michelle, because I don't know if I think of Margaret Atwood as someone who has built her career on being palatable…. But I think you're trying to say, in the positions she currently occupies. 

Michelle: I think Margaret Atwood had a long career. Like most people, she was probably more radical before she became one of the wealthiest authors in Canada. That's not a slight against Margaret Atwood, I'm sure lots of people would love to achieve that level of success. But it requires you to play nice with power players to get to that point, to get in those rooms, to get all those prizes — she's part of those systems and institutions. I think when you reach that level of success, there's a question of whether you have more in common with a major institution or a big bank in terms of your financial interests and your position in society than you do with 99 per cent of Canadian authors. So, I mean, she might be representative of Canadian literature — I don't mean to put this all on Margaret Atwood, I just don't know Louise Penny or her work — [but] I think Canadian authors as a group are a diverse bunch with very different financial positions and levels of success. Margaret Atwood is an outlier. And our biggest authors are maybe not representative of what a lot of these authors who have spoken out about the Giller Prize's involvement with Scotiabank are concerned about.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jess Low.