Author’s bank account feeling the Giller effect
Prize winner Redhill sees balance leap from $411 to $100,411 overnight
The morning after Michael Redhill won the Scotiabank Giller Prize — Canada’s most lucrative award for literature — he had just over $400 in his bank account.
On Tuesday, he walked into an RBC branch to cash a $100,000 cheque.
“They were sort of taken aback by it because, you know, people don’t walk in with cheques written out for that amount that often,” Redhill said of the bank staffer who handled the deposit. “And when she handed me the deposit slip, I just had to laugh.”
He posted two photos on Twitter with the caption, “Two curious incarnations of Bellevue Square on November 23rd, 2017.” One of those photos shows the Kensington Market park, now under construction, after which his literary thriller is named. The other shows his bank deposit slip, telling Redhill his new balance of $100,411.46.
Winning the Giller Prize, Redhill says, means recognition. It means standing among the literary ranks of previous winners including Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munroe and Margaret Atwood to deliver a live, tearful address to the nation on Monday night’s CBC broadcast. It means a surge of sales, thanks to the shiny sticker on future editions of Bellevue Square telling everyone he’s a winner. First and foremost, however, the prize will help settle his debts. Credit card bills, loans from friends: expenses incurred as he did his best to treat his writing as a full-time job. “It’s going to be really quite a relief to wipe those things out. Visa is very happy, I’m sure, that I won this prize,” he said with a laugh.
It’ll also give him room to work on his own writing without leaning as much on freelance editing work, sessional teaching at the University of Toronto and York University, and even — in times of great need — selling collectibles online to make ends meet.
It’ll even give him the chance to be less stressed out at home with his 16and 19-year-old sons. While he is at home a lot, the prize money will mean he isn’t as frantic about how to make rent, feed his family and pay the bills.
“I’m sure they’re going to appreciate the reduction in that stress,” Redhill said.
At one point, last May — while he was still working on revisions of Bellevue Square — Redhill said he showed up at an employment centre to try and pick up a part-time job. The interest payments on his credit cards were more than he could afford. Reducing his bill simply wasn’t possible because he couldn’t wipe it all out. “That was very scary,” he said. Of course, the shadow of poverty is far from unknown for career writers. Many try and cram writing between family and whatever part-time jobs or gigs they need to make rent. Not everyone will win a Giller — and not everyone can handle the crunch of a writer’s life. “What happened to me on Monday night is not something you can really dream of, because it seems foolish to dream of it,” he said.
Despite the Giller Prize money, he said he’ll still keep some of his side jobs.
“I mean, let’s face it — $100,000 is a lot of money all at once, but if you live in Toronto and you pay rent or a mortgage, you know, it’s not a lifetime of fun. I have to keep working. And I intend to.”
Bellevue Square is a literary thriller about a woman who’s terrified of running into her doppelganger in Kensington Market — someone she’s never known, but who everyone around her swears to have seen.
Redhill is working on a followup, the second in a planned trilogy called Mason of Tunica, due out in 2019. Freelance editing gigs will still be on his radar.
What did keep him going, Redhill said, was the community of writers that spurred him on. In his acceptance speech Monday night, he thanked Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding in particular because they “opened their door to me, and I’m grateful for the enthusiasm and encouragement they brought to my life.”
These friends weren’t necessarily able to pay Redhill’s bills, but they could offer support — emotionally, artistically, commiseratively.
“Nobody has said, ‘Look, you can’t make it work. Maybe you need to think about doing something else,’ ” Redhill said.
“All of your writer friends are the ones who say, ‘Yeah, it’s horrible being poor. Keep writing.’ ”