1,700 Canadian writers are asking the Giller Prize to drop charges against protestors.
More than 1,700 Canadian writers—including Noor Naga, Omar El Akkad, and Sarah Bernstein—have signed an open letter expressing support for the protestors who disrupted the Scotiabank Giller Prize gala at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto last Tuesday.
On Tuesday night, the ceremony for this year’s Giller Prize—Canada’s biggest literary award—was interrupted twice by pro-Palestinian protesters, who took to the stage holding signs that read “Scotiabank funds genocide,” a reference to the Giller Prize sponsor’s investment in Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons company.
As the open letter details: “During the gala, protesters were booed by the audience and forcibly removed, and after the event ended, they were reportedly detained by police for three hours, and are now facing charges.”
The letter goes on to make a passionate plea to Canada’s literary institutions:
We ask all of our literary institutions to be loud where our governments and news outlets have been silent: to call for a ceasefire; to express condemnation for the collective punishment of Palestinians and the war crimes being enacted by the Israeli government; to exert pressure on the Canadian government to stop its military funding to, and diplomatic support for, the Israeli government; to call for a release of all hostages: Israeli hostages and the 5000 Palestinian civilians (including 170 children) who are illegally incarcerated in Israeli prisons; and to urge Israel to end the 75-year occupation of Palestine. We also ask these institutions to do their utmost to protect artists within their purview from censure for speaking out.
Here is the open letter in full:
As writers and publishers, we express our support for the protestors who disrupted the Scotiabank Giller Prize gala at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto on November 13th, 2023. The protest called attention to Scotiabank’s $500 million stake in Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer; Scotiabank is Elbit’s largest foreign shareholder.
During the gala, protesters were booed by the audience and forcibly removed, and after the event ended, they were reportedly detained by police for three hours, and are now facing charges.
We stand with the protestors, and we urge that the charges against them be dropped. And we join our voices with hundreds of thousands of protestors across Canada who are decrying the unfolding genocide happening in Gaza and Palestine.
In the past five weeks, Israel has cut off water, electricity, and communication to Gaza. Over 11,000 Palestinians have been killed, the majority civilians and non-combatants. There are no more universities standing in Gaza. This week, Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in Gaza, was bombed until it could no longer be used. Among those who have died are more than 4000 children, many of them infants. This has been the deadliest attack for children in recent times. Many of our government officials and institutions swiftly condemned the October 7th deadly attack on 1200 Israeli civilians and the taking of 220 hostages. We ask that our institutions treat Palestinian civilians with the same concern and humanity.
We are writers and publishers who have been proud and grateful to receive invitations, nominations, grant funding, and prizes from literary institutions including the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Writers’ Trust of Canada, the Toronto Book Awards, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award, the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the Evergreen Award, the Writers’ Union of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts, among others. As working artists, we are reliant on these institutions for our livelihood.
We ask all of our literary institutions to be loud where our governments and news outlets have been silent: to call for a ceasefire; to express condemnation for the collective punishment of Palestinians and the war crimes being enacted by the Israeli government; to exert pressure on the Canadian government to stop its military funding to, and diplomatic support for, the Israeli government; to call for a release of all hostages: Israeli hostages and the 5000 Palestinian civilians (including 170 children) who are illegally incarcerated in Israeli prisons; and to urge Israel to end the 75-year occupation of Palestine. We also ask these institutions to do their utmost to protect artists within their purview from censure for speaking out.
You can see the full list of signatories, and (if you’re a Canadian writer) add your own name to the letter, here
As Noor Naga so succinctly put it yesterday:
Activists do not disrupt peace; they disrupt the silence of complicity. They do not disrupt order; they identify the disorder. We owe these activists our awareness, our aliveness. They did what we celebrate literature for doing: wake us up. 3/4
— Noor Naga 🇵🇸🇵🇸 (@noor_naga) November 20, 2023
