SILVER The GILLER
Celebrating 25 years of the Giller Prize, the award that changed Canadian literature
It has handed out more than $1 million in prize money, imbued Canadian books with glitz and glam, acted as a catalyst to bestseller glory, and started a prize culture that has changed the face of Canadian publishing. The Scotiabank Giller Prize, celebrating 25 years with Monday’s gala at Toronto’s Ritz Carlton Hotel, has grown in size and influence, with many highs and a few notable lows along the way. It is named after Doris Giller, who was the assistant books editor at the Toronto Star and wrote a column called “Reading Habits,” in which she interviewed celebrities about, yes, their reading habits. She spoke to actor Gordon Pinsent for the piece published Nov. 14, 1992. It was to be her last column. She died five months later, on April 25, 1993, of cancer. In his grief, her husband, businessman Jack Rabinovitch (who died in 2017), searched for a way to honour his wife and her love of books. Over a plate of chopped liver at Moishes Deli in Montreal, with his old friend Mordecai Richler and Doris’s old friend, editor David Staines, he filmed up an idea: a prize to celebrate the year’s best Canadian work of fiction. It would come with an award of $25,000. They'd hype it up so it would help sell books and make the a authors some money. And it would be nothing like Canada’s staid publishing crowd had ever seen before: fancy letter openers handed out at the launch; oversized embossed invitations delivered by butlers with long-stemmed roses; a swanky soiree at the Four Seasons Hotel’s Regency Ballroom in downtown Toronto. The dress code said "black tie” — a fancy dinner, an open bar, a party. A celebration of our reading habits.
Here, a selection of highlights from 25 years of the Giller:
1994: The first Giller gala was held on Nov. 2. In the cocktail hour before the formal dinner, someone quipped: “We were wondering what ‘black tie’ would mean to writers.” They rose to the occasion. It was, as Mordecai Richler famously called it, “this country’s most stylish literary crapshoot.”
“All I remember ... was being nervous and slightly overwhelmed,” says Cynthia Good, the then-publisher of Penguin Books. “I was so thrilled this was happening. Doris Giller had been a friend and I knew she would love to be remembered this way. Later celebrations were more glittery, but that first all-Canadian fiction gala was an occasion for pride in the craft and pride in the industry.”
M.G. Vassanji won that inaugural $25,000 prize for The Book of Secrets. After the prize was handed out, Jack kept the bar open and, even after that, everyone wanted to keep the party going, with many heading up to the famed (and now closed) Roof Lounge at the top of the Park Hyatt.
1995: The effect on book sales was noticed immediately. Vassanji’s book sold an additional 12,000 copies at a time when very few Canadian novels sold more than 5,000 copies at home.
In the Star, literary critic Philip Marchand wrote a piece questioning the “value for money” of prizes in literature, saying juries couldn’t be counted on to really pick the best book. As to prizes being useful because they generate buzz, he wrote: “This is not a very comforting response to writers who are struggling to make a living and to finish their novels at the same time, or who have published a novel that is not even being reviewed anywhere. It’s a trickledown theory of publicity that is even more dubious than the economic theory of the same name.” The argument still rages today.
1997: “A lot of people think the final indication that Jack R. would spare no expense on the Giller came in 1997,” says his old friend Jack Batten. “That was the year when the three judges were Bonnie Burnard, Peter Gzowski and Mavis Gallant. Mavis couldn’t or wouldn’t come to Toronto. So Jack paid for the other two judges to fly to Paris and spend several days in a good hotel.”
1998: Television came calling and the Giller Prize was broadcast across the nation on the cable arts channel Bravo. The Star’s Rita Zekas wrote about how the prize had grown: “When Giller’s husband Jack Rabinovitch founded the awards, the invite list ran about 150. Last night’s tally was closer to 450. ‘What a feeding frenzy,’ observed jury panellist Peter Gzowksi at the pre-cocktail party.”
2000: The jury, made up of Margaret Atwood, Jane Urquhart and Alistair MacLeod, couldn’t agree on a winner, so they came back with a tie. Jack didn’t want to split the prize so he handed out two cheques for $25,000 each: one to Michael Ondaatje for Anil’s Ghost and one to David Adams Richards for Mercy Among the Children. He would later quip that he didn’t want to do that again and it hasn’t happened since.
2002: Word was getting around that this was a party everyone should be in on and so a group of friends decided to have a house party. The Giller Light Bash was born. It has grown to include parties across the country with affordable tickets, feel-good support of Frontier College’s literacy programs, dressing up as your favourite character, local celebs and live broadcasts of the show.
2004: Hitting its 10th anniversary, the prize had changed. As famed editor Phyllis Bruce once told the Star, “I’ve attended every Giller evening since its inception and watched it grow from this elegant literary event to this media-driven, celebrity-studded evening.” But even a community now accustomed to glitz and glamour can be star-struck. “By the time I attended the 2004 Giller bash, I considered myself a gala veteran, pretty much immune to the Giller’s dazzling venue, the fancy evening gowns, and the quantity and quality of free liquor,” says James Grainger, the review editor at Quill and Quire from 2000 to 2005. “I’d even gotten used to hobnobbing with authors. So I was shocked to find myself in full fan boy paralysis when (editor) Doug Gibson introduced me to his friend Alice Munro, who won the award that night. I’ve blocked out whatever inanity I shared with them. It was not my finest moment.”
2005: The growth of the prize continued through a partnership agreement with Scotiabank . The name was changed and the prize pot doubled to $50,000, with $40,000 going to the winner and $2,500 to each of the finalists.
2006: Seamus O’Regan, then a CTV correspondent, was set to host the Giller gala when he “was called into the field by the network to report from Afghanistan,” says Elana Rabinovitch, Jack’s daughter and executive director of the prize. “He called his good friend, Justin Trudeau, to pinch hit for him. Vincent Lam won the Giller that year for his short story collection Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. In his acceptance speech, Lam was visibly moved as he thanked Justin for his father’s policies of multiculturalism and open immigration that allowed his parents to emigrate from Vietnam to Canada.”
He also thanked Margaret Atwood and recalled their first meeting on a boat: he a ship’s doctor in the Arctic; she a passenger. He asked her to look at his manuscript and she agreed, but “only if you want me to tell you the truth,” which he did.
Controversy flared with an essay from writer Stephen Henighan, who accused the awards of being skewed not only to big publishing houses and establishment-backed writers, but also to southern Ontario, with all of the prize winners until then “living within a two-hour drive of downtown Toronto.”
Later that year, for the first time on the long list of nominees, as the Star noted, “nearly half of the publishers represented were relatively small ‘literary’ presses — an implicit admission, perhaps, that Giller nominees in the past have been overwhelmingly published by big Toronto houses.” It’s also the first year works in translation appeared on the short list, finally bringing Quebec writers into the Giller fold.
2009: Foreign jurors were introduced to the panel for the first time in 2007. A couple of years later, there was controversy at British writer Victoria Glendinning’s comments about how characters in Canadian books “sit, brooding, on Muskoka chairs,” and on the number of immigrant novels with “flashbacks to Granny’s youth in Ukraine or wherever.” Ouch. Linden MacIntyre won for his novel The Bishop’s Man and promptly misplaced the prize cheque worth $50,000. His wife, CBC host Carol Off, later found it crumpled up in a pocket.
2010: A small literary publisher won the big prize for the first time: Gaspereau Press for Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists. The Giller Effect, as expected, took hold and buyers were lining up for the book, but Gaspereau wasn’t able to meet demand; it eventually brought in a bigger publisher, Douglas & McIntyre, to print 70,000 copies.
2014: The prize pot grew to $140,000, with $100,000 for the winner and $10,000 for each finalist. The first recipient of the bigger pot was Sean Michaels, a Montreal writer who debuted with his novel Us Conductors.
2015: The announcement of the short list was done with a touch of class each year and this time it was at the Art Gallery of Ontario, with coffee, croissants and mimosas. But there was a gas leak, a flurry of activity and about 100 guests from the media and publishing industry were herded into the tiny Bau-Xi Gallery across the road on Dundas St. W., procured as a last-minute replacement venue. “I know this is an explosive list, but this is too much,” quipped Rabinovitch.
2016: Madeleine Thien became the last Giller winner to receive the prize from Jack himself, for her book Do Not Say We Have Nothing. He died the next year, in August 2017, after a fall.
2017: The celebratory tenor of the prize had a sombre air. Jack was not in the room to intone his trademark line: “For the price of a dinner out in this town you can buy all the books. So eat at home and buy the books.”
The morning after winning the prize for his novel Bellevue Square, author Michael Redhill tweeted out a copy of his bank slip: the balance read $100,411.46, a big step up from the $411 in his account before he won; proving that, in the case of at least some of the winners, Rabinovitch’s desire to make the authors some money bore fruit. As it will continue to do in years to come.