The Giller Prize is rigged and corrupt,
says Geist columnist
Geist magazine columnist Stephen Henighan says the Giller Prize is rigged. He isn't elliptical about it; in his Kingmaker's column he calls the prize "the most conspicuous example of corporate suffocation of the public institutions that built our literary culture".
Nothing signalled the collapse of the literary organism as vividly as the appearance of this glitzy chancre on the hide of our culture. Year after year the vast majority of the books shortlisted for the Giller came from the triumvirate of publishers owned by the Bertelsmann Group: Knopf Canada, Doubleday Canada and Random House Canada. Like the three musketeers, this trio is in fact a quartet: Bertelsmann also owns 25 percent of McClelland & Stewart, and now manages M&S’s marketing. From 1994 to 2004, all the Giller winners, with the exception of Mordecai Richler, lived within a two-hour drive of the corner of Yonge and Bloor.Henighan is also scornful of the corrosive role of Chapters Indigo and of the influence and manipulation by a "family compact" of writers like Margaret Atwood, Adrienne Clarkson and Alice Munro as jurors and reports on the coronation (not Henighan's word) of this year's winner Vincent Lam by Atwood.
posted by D. B. Scott at
8:52 am
4 Comments:
Well, and rightly so. If Vincent Lam's collection is the "best" Canadian book of 2006 then Canadian literature is in even more dire and desperate striats than I owuld have though otherwise.
Even though I haven't read Lam's book, I loved Henighan's article just because it was so outspoken in this age of mealy-mouthedness. If those accused feel it was unfair I look forward to seeing their defense of themselves and the Giller prize.
I agree with the comment about Vincent Lam's book. I know it was given to me as a Christmas present because it was a prize winner...not because the giver had read it. If they had read it they would have found out what I did; that it is boring and adolescent...
Last fall, at our request, Chapters Indigo graciously agreed to lend the Scotiabank Giller Prize books that could be used to build a literary centrepiece for each table at our annual prize event. We asked for big, fat hardcover books to achieve that effect, books that were to be covered in laminating paper and stacked like sculptures. These books were not, as has been alleged, to be part of any goody bag to be given out to guests. They were props. That guests actually made off with copies of these books is an argument for closing the bar a little earlier perhaps, but those books were most decidedly not swag. Where anyone got the impression that Canada’s leading book chain and a major Canadian literary prize would think it was a good idea to give out a Stephen King novel to their guests is baffling. So in case I wasn’t clear. Chapters Indigo loaned us over 200 books purely in the service of supporting and promoting Canadian literature. Their efforts should be lauded, not criticized.
More understandable, at least for sheer entertainment value, are the ravings of Stephen Henighan. Henighan’s bitterness toward the Giller Prize is almost legendary. No one’s quite sure why, but hopefully all the brow sweat and ink he spills writing about us will at least stimulate more conversations about and reading of Canadian literature. What's striking is how prescient Mordecai Richler was when he stated, at the launch of The Giller Prize almost 14 years ago, that "when you give Canadians an apple, they look for the razor blade inside".
Elana Rabinovitch
Scotiabank Giller Prize
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