Last month, the Scottish government came up with a one-time grant of £300,000 to cover the Edinburgh International Book Festival, after pressure from environmental protestors caused the previous sponsor, Baillie Gifford, to back out.
This week in Canada, its premier book award, the Giller Prize, having lost its primary sponsor, Scotiabank, after protests, has appealed to the Canadian government to keep things afloat:
Without stable funding, the Giller Foundation says the prize will be forced to end operations at the end of 2025, according to a report Wednesday in the Globe and Mail.
The annual $100,000 prize for fiction ended its 20-year partnership with lead sponsor Scotiabank earlier this year. At that time, Giller Foundation executive director Elana Rabinovitch did not comment on the financial effect the loss of the lead sponsor would have on the prize’s future.
The foundation has drafted a letter to the federal government asking for $5 million in funding over three years to help it continue operations, the Globe reports. The letter has reportedly not yet been sent to Ottawa.
“We are incredibly bullish about the future of the prize and all of its various programs and activities, and are actively engaging with potential sponsors,” Rabinovitch said in an email to Q&Q on Thursday. “Our aim is to host an amazing event this fall that not only champions Canadian authors but also upholds our long-standing tradition of honouring exceptional Canadian fiction. Our focus remains steadfastly on celebrating Canadian authors and their books.”
Rabinovitch told the Globe that the foundation is considering scrapping the televised gala event and national author tour in the future as a way to keep the prize alive, but did not provide Q&Q with any further comment.
The goal here seems to be to find a corporation or an individual who accumulated billions of dollars in assets, which they are willing to use, in part, to patronize the arts, who earned those billions doing very nice things. Failing that, when a long-time sponsor is found lacking in some moral dimension, it is then up to the government to fill the funding gap, though in the long run this is bound to change the nature of the prize, and also brings with it the need for a justification of why the government ought to use its funds this way. “But the state should fund the arts” isn’t a good enough response, because state support for the arts can do many things besides giving $100,000 prizes for fiction. I like fiction, and I like public funding of the arts, but were I still a Canadian taxpayer I would balk at the suggestion that this is a good use of $5 million, money that a Canadian bank was, in the past, pleased to provide.
I hope that the planet can reduce its reliance on fossil fuels, and I think the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza are immoral. But if I feel so strongly about those issues that I refuse to have anything to do with any company that has any ties to such things, then I have to accept that I might not have a book festival or a fiction prize anymore – that would be a price to be paid for my convictions. Saying “well, the government can fund it” is a cop out, too easy.
Cross-posted at https://michaelrushton.substack.com/
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