Authors withdraw from $100,00 Canadian book prize because of sponsors’ ties to Israel

By Barry Ellsworth

TRENTON, Canada (AA) - The prestigious CAN$100,000 ($73,000) Canadian Scotiabank Giller Prize was dealt a blow Wednesday when 15 authors pulled their books from consideration because of the sponsors’ ties to Israeli arms manufacturers.

“As authors, we cannot abide our work being used to provide cover for sponsors actively investing in arms funding and Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians,” they wrote in a letter to the Giller Foundation. “As long as the Giller Foundation continues to receive funding from ANY sponsors who are directly invested in Israel’s occupation of Palestine, it will still be complicit in genocide.”

The Scotiabank Giller Prize awards CAN$100,000 to the winning author and it has traditionally been a stepping stone to huge success for a writer.

The letter, termed Canlit Responds by the authors, was also signed by five previous winners. It demanded the Giller Foundation pressure its largest sponsor, Scotiabank -- one of Canada’s largest banks -- to “divest” from Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer, as well as the Azrieli Foundation, Indigo and Audible.

The letter said Scotiabank, which cut by half its CAN$500 million funding in Elbit after protests last year, still has “millions” in the company.

The authors wrote that the Azrieli Foundation Group “continues to conduct business on settlements in the occupied West Bank … settlements deemed illegal under international law” and promotes “immigration to Israel to expand the Zionist settler colonial project.”

Indigo, by far Canada’s largest book-selling company, provides scholarships to non-Israeli citizens “to serve in the IOF (Israel Occupation Forces) to displace, terrorize and kill Palestinians,” it said.

Audible, owned by Amazon, partners with tech company Palantir, whose chief executive officer said he has lost employees for his vocal and public support of Israel’s military response to Gaza, “in other words his support of genocide,” according to the letter.

The letter urges “our peers and other authors to join us in withdrawing their work.”

There has been no response from the Giller Foundation.