Oh Giller. We need to talk. Again.

Dear people who run Giller:

I see the prize was given a bit of a boost with the Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation’s multi-year gift of $4-million, which you intend to use to fund the year-round programming. That’s good but as we know won’t solve the permanent endowment problem. Apart from the funding, the prize, let’s be frank, has the mandate problem and the execution problem, both of which are upstream from the funding problem.

What is the award for? To promote and celebrate Canadian fiction? If so, its shortlist hasn’t been doing that for a while now. It has though been promoting and celebrating fiction by people who don’t live in Canada (any longer, or even ever) and don’t set their fiction in Canada, but are published by Penguin Random House Canada and Harper Collins Canada - and occasionally Coach House Press, the beloved indie of the Prize. Given the frequency of their long- and short-listing, perhaps the Big Two (with Simon & Schuster Three) can get the cash together and fund this award, and clarify its selection criteria?

If the award really wants to further Canadian fiction, well you’re going to have to decide what that is beyond “fiction by an author who once spent some time in one of Canada’s MFA programs and has good connections in Canadian publishing”. How about… fiction and creative nonfiction set in Canada or about Canadians? If Americans and Brits (and Indians and the Chinese and Nigerians) want to set fiction in Canada or write about Canadians, their publishers can nominate them. There won’t be a rush from abroad for nominations, so that shouldn’t be a worry. But you will lose many of the familiar faces from the MFA-agenting-Big3 industrial complex who see Canada as a stepping stone to a bright future of American writing. They can submit their work for other awards, and there are many others for them. Yann Martel and Omar El Akkad’s agents will know where else to look, trust me.

Also, yes, I think you can join fiction and memoir-ish nonfiction into one category. These are the times of extreme scarcity of Canadian writing and reading, you might have noticed? No one in Canadian media will review your shortlisted five, you have to keep that in mind. Canadian newspaper editors don’t care about books, and will cover them only if there are political controversies or sexual abuse scandals happening in the sector. Canadians have been trained - by the decades of poor or no cultural policy by Liberal and Conservative governments - not to bother with Canadian fiction. They have been further put off by the Zhdanovite turn in Canadian publishing which fed them social and racial justice fiction. So you will need to decide if you’d like to keep rewarding advocacy fiction - and you can certainly create a category for it, call it something flattering, so that you big PRH-HC-chosen indie clientele can keep nominating their people.

Also, you have to be aware of your constituency and what a bundle of disenfranchisement, ressentiment, Yankee envy and messiah complexes the average Canadian author is. They feel, with some justification, untouched by history and want some of it immediately. Those of us who actually grew up in politically tumultuous regions where violence has been a working method of solving differences understand what a major win a boring life is. Canadian literati don’t, or they’ve forgotten, so they embraced the woke omni-cause with ardour and now all that ardour moved to the Israel-Palestine conflict. You will, in other words, still be hearing about the Scotiabank Elbit engagement from the people who celebrate the impoverishment of the Giller Prize as some major moral success for Canadian literature. Some believe they have been blacklisted for that, and for supporting Galloway’s accuser, while continuing to publish, get hired to teach writing, and get nominated for awards.

If you are remaining true to this constituency, your sources of funding and all of your practices will be questioned on an ongoing basis.

I am indeed proposing a split into more than one award. The Fiction Will Change the World Award (see, I found a flattering title and you can have it for free) can be funded by organic farms, rescue shelters, the Palestinian-owned Rabba or Paramount (hey, listen - has anyone approached them?), Karma co-op in the Annex, and whatever ethical businesses and foundations the committee can drum up. I’m sure most will rush to fund a Canadian book award.

Then the Prize for Innovative Fiction can be for the pleasure of the rest of us irresponsible riffraff who still believe that sorting multi-generational international conflict is above our paygrade and that fiction is about one solitude meeting another across time, body, and geography.

I see that you established an advisory panel to show you the way forward. I’m afraid this panel won’t do. Did someone phone this task in while away at the cottage? Eric Dupont (Quebecois), Charlotte Gray (S&S, HC, token supposed old-school), Ann-Marie MacDonald (PRH, hasn’t written anything in yonks before Fayne which looks like an alien ship landed from the planet of the 1990s publishing), William Ping (debut novelist with HC, Lisa Moore student), Kai Thomas (debut novelist, PRH) and the Globe and Mail’s Tanya Talaga (!) (person who helped shape the 215 graves in Kamloops frenzy and is still sticking to the narrative). I’d be curious to know what you believe this panel can do for you? The debut novelists will not want to shake the boat because they’d quite like a career. Anglo-Canadian fiction has a set of problems to tackle which are different from what franco literature in this country may be facing so I am not sure how invested a Quebecois writer would be in the matter. And what could Tanya Talaga say about literature, ours or anyone else’s on this blue planet? Yes she’s written fiction - some through her reporting - but let’s be serious here for a blame minute.

Can you also, while I have you, fix the repeat winner business? In a small literature, no author should have received such a massive prize twice, and it’s insulting to everybody else that year who published a book. Really, there was no one else worthy of it but a past winner? The prize money will probably be smaller in the future, which I think is fine, but if you do it right, a Giller may still have the power to change a writer’s life from precarity to middle class stability - as they’ll be quickly hired by a writing school after.

So off you go to fix things. I know the Canadian part of it will be hard – as hard as the incorporated constituency part – but it’s important. If you keep awarding people and fiction with little or no connection with Canada, you should change your mandate to match your practices. If you keep prizing representation and advocacy fiction, then all of you, the chairs, the advisory panel, the juries, the events, the galas and most certainly the funders, will be seen as political and will be advocacy targeted. If that’s what you want, change your mandate to reflect that, and good luck.

With fondness, believe it or not,

LP