In November 2024, Boycott Giller was launched by CanLit Responds and the No Arms In The Arts campaign. Over the following months, 500+ authors and book workers pledged to refuse participation in the Giller Prize until Scotiabank, Indigo Books, and the Azrieli Foundation were no longer sponsors. That pressure led to the Giller Prize and decades-long lead sponsor Scotiabank parting ways in February 2025. Recently, in an email to CanLit Responds, Giller Executive Director Elana Rabinovitch confirmed that those remaining sponsorships—Indigo Books and the Azrieli Foundation—have ended as of 2026. This means that the demands of the boycott have been successfully met.

Those 500+ writers and book workers held the picket line as a collective, despite the Giller and their supporters’ attempts to paint us as activists trying to destroy the literary community. After more than one year of our boycott and more than two years of collective organizing, of the strategic withholding of our labour, and of our refusal to allow our work to launder the reputations of those who aid and abet the suffering of Palestinians, we have struck a material blow against the perpetration and enabling of Israel’s genocide: the Giller Prize has separated from all its genocide-invested sponsors. At the start of 2023, former sponsor Scotiabank was Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems’ largest foreign shareholder. Now, following the nationwide pressure campaign our organizing has been part of, Scotiabank has zero stake in that company.

The Giller Foundation itself has refused to make a public announcement clarifying the prize’s funding. This comes after two and a half years of ignoring the demands of the authors and audiences it claims to represent. While the boycott is over, the Giller’s self-inflicted reputational damage can’t be undone unless it shows efforts to ensure its current and future sponsorships are transparent and ethical. At the very least, these new sponsors should not be profiting from arms sales, genocide, and dispossession.

The Giller has also refused to acknowledge their responsibility in the criminal charges of protestors who disrupted the Prize’s 2023 broadcast. As reported by Josiah Neufeld for The Walrus, “Giller organizers berated police into charging the protesters,” meaning they were direct participants in the suppression and criminalization of pro-Palestinian speech and protest. After nearly two years of court dates, legal fees, and Charter Rights–violating bail conditions, all five arrestees had their charges dropped.

While the Giller Foundation largely refused any official public or private response to the CanLit Responds campaign, on multiple occasions the prize and its staff has silenced and censured writers showing solidarity with Palestine or boycotting the prize’s genocide-invested sponsors. 2023 winner Sarah Bernstein pulled out of a Giller event when she was told questions about Gaza would not be allowed; Giller executive director Elana Rabinovitch denied the incident occurred. Later, Toronto Life had to publish a redaction admitting Rabinovitch’s denial was a lie. Rabinovitch has used her social media accounts to send bizarre, personal insults to writers, culminating in her smearing past winners, Madeleine Thien and Omar El-Akkad on her accounts; Thien has since publicly requested that the prize cease using her name, image and work in its promotion. Rabinovitch also sent harassing e-mails to authors accusing them of antisemitism, which was reported on in the Toronto Star. Rabinovitch remains Executive Director of the Foundation.

Our commitment to principled action as writers and book workers does not end here. Israel’s genocide against Palestine continues. Israel and the US’ war on Iran has killed thousands, and escalating attacks on Lebanon have already displaced one in five of the nation’s residents. Through all this, Canadian cultural institutions have been happy to maintain business-as-usual with sponsors directly profiting from Israel’s bloody campaigns.

We expect the Giller to spend the months ahead of their 2026 prize gala scrambling to repair their damaged relationships. They’ve been dragged, reluctantly, into a cultural landscape where artists are confronting the entanglement of Zionist funding and the arts; of murderous corporate sponsors and family foundations hiding their direct support for Israel behind a charitable name. The success of this boycott is not the result of the Prize taking a moral stand, but of writers organizing and strategizing together.

We will be watching to see who the Giller’s new funders are; we will not accept a return to a genocidal status quo. As we have seen with the Scotiabank Photography Award boycott’s recent success, as well as the Toronto Arts Foundation’s cutting of ties with the Azrieli Foundation, the tide is turning against these complicit sponsors. As writers, we will continue to join together with other arts workers building towards a free Palestine.