The Scotiabank Giller Prize: How Canadian. Excerpt from the Introduction by Olga Stein

The Scotiabank Giller Prize: How Canadian. Excerpt from the Introduction by Olga Stein

But regardless of whether or not the Giller declares an interest in ideas of nation when selecting juries, the prize does present a vision of Canadian literature. The visibility of a select group of works chosen by an awards jury contributes to constructing the contemporary national literature for the reading public.
— Gillian Roberts, Prizing Literature: The Celebration and Circulation of National Culture

Whether one agrees or disagrees with their mandates, loves or intensely dislikes the hype, glitz, and marketing surrounding them, literary prizes are here to stay. Like every other country, Canada is home to numerous literary awards, with the Griffin and Scotiabank-Giller prizes being perhaps our ‘biggest’ — the most spectacular, most followed and discussed. My own position is that literary culture needs prizes, and that the institutions that run literary prizes, despite the flaws we might attribute to them, perform an important public service.

My conviction derives in part from having been involved with the Books in Canada First Novel Award. That opportunity to contribute and learn about the administration of a literary prize was invaluable. Yet despite gaining an insider’s perspective on how literary awards are managed, and the privilege of observing first hand the joyful reactions of writers and publishers, I never arrived at a full appreciation of the cultural roles of literary prizes and their long-term and wide-reaching effects. Managing an award is not the same as studying it or thinking about it in ways that are dispassionate and informed by other types of scholarly understanding and research. My sense now is that prizes have grown more, not less important, especially as book reviewing in newspapers and respected literary journals has declined. This means that we need to understand their impact — good and bad — on literary culture in Canada. We need to conceptualize the kinds of practice/s prizes engage in, and grapple with the prizes themselves as institutions with specific kinds of cultural goals and corresponding influence.

A small number of books about the Booker, Nobel, and the Pulitzer do exist, along with some critical essays, which look at the sociological contexts in which they operate, and the implications for national book culture when certain books are valorized while others escape well-deserved notice. Nevertheless, there hasn’t been a field established for the study of prizes. There is no road map, in other words, that would direct a scholar to the most fruitful analytic framework for engaging with literary awards. Nor is there a way to ascertain from the outset the parameters of a book-length study of a single prize like the Scotiabank Giller.

For me, charting the way came down to formulating sets of questions, starting with the more obvious ones: When we speak of prizes and prize culture, what do we mean? How do literary prizes lend themselves to carrying out theoretical work that has scholarly value? How does a study of literary prizes fit within established academic disciplines? How do we document and theorize the function of prizes within existing networks of literary institutions or the literary field (champ littéraire), as conceived by cultural philosopher Pierre Bourdieu? What is the impact of literary prizes, collectively and individually, on publishers, writers, literary critics and academics — all agents involved in producing and circulating literature?^[i]

The larger scope of the project soon started coming into view. Yet before I could properly attend to the first set of questions, I realized that I had to think about the political and economic contexts governing the ‘behaviour’ of national prizes. These contexts include variables like the state of a nation’s publishing industry, its politics and official and dominant discourses, as well as its ambient and more ex-centric literary culture/s — the diverseness of literary traditions, regions, and languages, as well as its pedagogical and critical practices. What is the role of literary prizes, I also had to ask, at a time when authoritative institutions and traditional means of shaping literary opinion (through newspapers and book reviewing) are limited on the one hand, while on the other, online zines and commentary are proliferating and democratizing literary culture?

Other related questions arose: How are prizes shaped by current technologies and practices (the multiple digital platforms that sell, market, and enable wide reader participation in the daily lives of prizes)? In other words, how do we relate prizes to the new digital marketplace, where literary news, such as prize-related announcements and celebratory assessments of books, become ‘content’ that is leveraged to grow audiences? This also forced me to consider whether prize-related interventions are confined to a local/national economy of literary production or whether they seep into and influence the literary cultures of other nations (and vice-versa) by way of assumptions and expectations concerning fiction.

Finally, I circled back to asking why a study of the Giller was needed. Is the Giller exceptional in terms of its interventions in Canada’s literary culture? If the answer is yes, then what is the currency of a contemporary prize like the Giller, and what do we make of prestige tokens like the logograms we see embossed on the front covers of nominated and winning books, which are the sticker equivalent of a trophy? What is their impact on critical reception? And further, how do these markers or tokens function and reinforce an established (albeit evolving) ecosystem that recognizes, processes, trades in, or leverages these imprimaturs? How do we measure, interpret, and codify this activity? And lastly, what links can we hypothesize between all of this and contemporary fiction in Canada?  

There were other important questions, certainly. The ones just posed are merely a sample, intended to offer readers some sense of my project’s contours. They were also a necessary starting point for thinking about the economy of prestige.

The Scotiabank Giller Prize is an emblematic prize. Its rapid growth since its founding in 1994, its generous funding, and its embrace by the media, make it an ideal case study for examining the emergence of a new-ish type of institution: a critical ‘machinery’ for valorizing literary fiction in Canada. Founded in 1994 by Jack Rabinovitch (1930 – 2017), the Giller has come to preside over a field that has, over the past four decades, expanded with the participation of new institutional actors, literary journalists and critics, as well as new communities of readers. For better or worse, present-day literary culture, which includes the whole range of discussion, criticism, and pedagogy surrounding literature, is increasingly linked with awards-related celebration, and the marketing of and commerce in books associated with prizes.

In Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today (1996), Richard Todd asserted that academics have been “reluctan[t] to accept the real extent to which contemporary literary canon-formation is subject to powerful, rapidly changing market forces…, [and] that the academic reader of contemporary serious literary fiction must reflect on the impact of such forces on the general reader” (9).^[ii] In Canada, the Scotiabank Giller Prize is an instance of a generative and organizing locus of both market and cultural activity. Seen as the most glamorous of the country’s literary awards by journalists and literary critics, the Giller influences both the economics of publishing (“market forces”), and Canada’s literary culture, which includes the valuations engaged in by its various communities.

The Books in Canada First Novel Award (now the Amazon Canada First Novel Award) grew in nation-wide recognition and importance during the 1990s. My personal involvement with this award, from 1995 to 2008, allowed me to witness firsthand its changing status. By 1995, the First Novel Award, although modest by today’s standards, appeared to be of considerable worth to debuting authors for its capacity to pluck writers out of obscurity. It was also of great importance to their publishers — not just in monetary terms, but also in terms of the approval that even a nomination betokened. These, it should be underscored, are the paratextual effects of prizes identified by Gérard Genette in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1987). Likewise, they are the intertextual meanings, discussed by Tony Bennett in Outside Literature (1990), invariably attached to books and their authors in a context of increasingly public celebration and spectacle making.^[iii] Yet even today, it is difficult for writers, publishers, and other professionals in literary publishing (reviewers, editors) to assess or explain the significance of a literary award. Herein lies the problem, as I came to understand it. This is why we need to ask about the relationships being forged between a contemporary national literature and a country’s most prominent literary contests?

The volume and persistence of journalistic commentary published in Canada suggests that the Giller is the most esteemed among domestic literary awards. We glean information about the Giller through such commentary, and from news about nominees, judges, and winners the Giller itself directs at the public. The Giller offers carefully worded press releases, blurbs on its website and social media pages, and a collection of highly crafted audiovisual presentations with judges’ comments on shortlisted books, which are featured at the annual gala before winners are announced. Beyond this, we have little access to the internal life of this well ensconced institution. Over the course of its 30 years, there have been very few scandals or revelatory leaks surrounding nominations and selections of winners, unlike the case with the Nobel Prize for Literature. Word of minor glitches occasionally surfaced: for example, when the 2000 Giller was awarded to both Michael Ondaatje for Anil’s Ghost and David Adams Richards for Mercy Among the Children, Rabinovitch declared that the prize must never again be awarded to two authors in one year. Criticisms about selections of winners have been published, such as Stephen Henighan’s critique of the Giller, “Kingmakers,” in Geist magazine [no 63], and his less critical follow-up piece, “How a Giller Critic Got Invited to the Party” [Nov, 2015]). A small number of scholarly essays allege that literary awards are now a realm of cultural activity that is ‘colonized’ by neoliberalism or, more simply, capitalism. They also assert that the Giller exemplifies the failures of Canadian multiculturalism by subscribing to the most commercially advantageous, and therefore specious versions of cultural inclusivity. However, apart from such critical essays, and a few journalistic attempts at sideswiping, there is no substantive body of information on the Giller. There is no available archive of judges’ opining (the assessments posted by the Giller, one presumes, are filtered and edited for maximum dramatic and promotional effect), and there has been no apparent effort to compile and scrutinize the commentary from the past 30 years — that is, until I undertook a study of the Giller for my PhD.

Given the prestige-making currency of modern day prizes, it is surprising that in Canada literary prizes, and the Giller in particular, have escaped scholarly attention to such an extent. Prize-based imprimaturs, prestige — in the abstract sense (of celebrity, for instance), but also in the form of the aforementioned ‘markers’ or visible ‘tokens’ — have real, quantifiable and measurable effects. Their value is acknowledged by all the stakeholders: i.e., the authors, their publishers, editors, and consumers. My book-length study aims to make this value more apparent. It does this by mapping the relationships between the Giller’s celebrations and the larger cultural context of book discussion, publishing and bookselling, as well as pedagogy and criticism surrounding Canadian literary fiction.

In The Scotiabank Giller Prize: How Canadian, I surveyed 26 years’ worth of existing commentary, statements, press releases, and other coverage of the Giller. The book offers a sustained effort to relate this material to critical writing on Canada’s literary field of the past five decades, and expands on existing narratives and critical work on the Giller. Moreover, the intention here is to broaden the foundation for the pursuit of scholarship on literary prizes in Canada by suggesting new analytical avenues. For instance, the Giller provides a test bed for understanding a new digital landscape and economy, one that aggregates and channels ‘markers’ of prestige across complex search spaces and marketplaces. The availability of ‘big data’ from electronic sales systems, social media, and online analytics constitutes raw material from which one can develop an analytical model of this prestige-driven economy. In time, these tools will tell us more and with great accuracy, but we are able even now to demonstrate that Canada’s prize-based ecosystem — with the Giller at its centre — both monetizes the prestige value of the award, and plays a crucial role in shaping literary opinion.

There are many ways to demonstrate that the Giller exercises enormous influence. There is the Giller’s impact on book sales (raising the number of readers for nominated and winning books), its trackable capacity to generate journalistic and scholarly interest in its listed and winning books, and the number of Giller followers. These and other available metrics or measures of prestige and cultural influence suggest that the Giller functions as one of the paratextual features of the current-day literary marketplace, determining authors’ and publishers’ success. The award has a demonstrable impact on authors’ status and careers, on the status or reputations of their publishers, and on the ways contemporary Canadian literary fiction is conceived (or re-conceived) as a result. Furthermore, if a contemporary Canadian fiction canon, however provisional or fluctuating, can be postulated, then we need to examine the relationship that exists between it and the Giller.

The project itself belongs to a particular and relatively new domain of scholarship. American and British scholars of prizes, James English and Richard Todd respectively, were instrumental in fostering it in the past three decades, but it is part of an older discipline to which the French sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) made an immense contribution. This study brings Bourdieu’s conceptual framework to bear on the unique features of Canada’s literary field to examine how these helped shape the Giller Prize in its first decade, and its evolution since then. It shows, in other words, how the Giller succeeded in entering this field, how it is both defined by and redefines the field, and how it maintains its position of cultural prominence and authority therein.

….

Today’s Prizes

In what is a significant departure from the traditional practices of academic institutions (and what John Guillory’s institutional sociology sums up as the “pedagogic imaginary”^[iv]), present-day prize-giving agencies like the Giller are increasingly working to close the gap between their own institutional “high” or exclusive culture, and that of the nation-state or the national reading public. How well this is being done, and to what extent this is reflected in nominated and winning books has yet to be fully answered. Meanwhile, what cannot be disputed is that a study of prizes must come to terms with both the impact of altered cultural practices of the past four decades, and the corresponding changes in institutional attitudes and strategies. 

In The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (2005), James English carved out a theoretical space for studying the more current phase of the sociology of literary prizes. A major development in prize culture, he argued, paralleled or coincided with other cultural and economic transformations. The initial broadcasting and televising of the announcement of Booker Prize nominees and its winner in 1981 is one instance of this. The broadcasting of award proceedings — the introduction of the televisual into prize culture — fundamentally altered, according to English, not just the internal institutional culture of the Booker Prize and other prizes emulating it; it altered, he asserted, the material and cultural conditions for the production of literary fiction in the book publishing industry. It is highly relevant then that the phase discussed by English in a book published in 2005 preceded the transformative period covered by this study.

The last decade and a half in particular encompasses a number of major changes: shifts in the delivery of information and entertainment; increasing industry convergence, causing adjustment in corporate approaches to the marketing of culture (“convergence culture”); and the onset of televisual ubiquity, which includes the Internet, all forms of social media and web-based audience engagement. These changes produce a dynamic, interactive, and audience-driven context that current-day prizes deploy to dominate their prize space. This points to another way that the study of prizes can branch out. New technologies force us to recognize that Bourdieu’s notion of prestige, particularly as regards the sources of collective acclamation or consensus in valuation, is in important ways rendered obsolete or challenged by these conditions. This is especially the case at a time when cultural prestige is contingent on (and measured by) the number of followers or viewers a prize secures, and when even high culture relies on clever marketing.

Vastly extended practices of marketing literary culture are used to attract as large a following as possible. Moreover, media and industry convergences alter significantly consumers’ collective response to and participation in shaping the practices and strategies used by cultural institutions. Some of these practices converge with and adopt the strategies of televisual industries through their paratexts (texts about the nominated or winning texts). This too must be acknowledged for its capacity to affect the writing of fiction since all cultural producers are aware of what sells best (even if the target market is comprised of consumers of literary fiction), and what makes the selling/marketing effective. Consequently, the question of how televisual paratexts, when mediated by prizes, leave their mark on current-day fiction also needs to be raised.

…

The changes just discussed have led to the popularization of literary prizes in general, or, to put it another way, the perviousness of Bourdieu’s “field of restricted production” and all variations thereon (including the process/es entailed in literary prize adjudication and related announcements) to the interests and ‘tastes’ of a larger segment of the reading public. The current-day striking overlap of what were formerly separate zones of cultural production, as conceived by Bourdieu, has resulted in, among other things, the “Oscarization” of literary prizes with all of the accompanying fanfare and televisual broadcasts, as well as in the celebrity of authors and their works.

As an institution, the Giller navigated the cultural, political, and economic exigencies of Canada’s literary field from the time of its founding. It has adapted to a variety of other developments, and has shown itself to be amenable to change. It is clear, for example, that the Giller works to promote, brand, and secure larger audiences for its products and activities. One needs only to look at its media partnership with the CBC, which livestreams the annual gala nationwide, rebroadcasts the event on its website (CBCBooks.ca), and parlays it into book-related content for the general public.^[v] These and similar institutional/corporate relationships are ways the Giller contributes to a certain culture of reception, valuation, and literary production. It interpolates popular culture (which should not be equated with low culture) into literature-related celebration and celebrification of authors. We can observe this being done when the Giller taps into or repurposes narratives for far-reaching audience appeal (with popular variations on the triumph-over-adversity story, for example).

The Giller has provoked criticism in the past for being Toronto-centric, and for privileging a particular coterie of writers and international publishers, especially the Bertelsmann group. The criticism or negative publicity, whether warranted or not, is, as James English argued, indicative of the perceived importance a prize and the social and cultural ‘duties’ ascribed to it. The Giller is expected to function as a reliable arbiter of literary excellence. Moreover, since it purports to be a national prize, it is expected to represent the diverse literatures of Canada’s main regions.^[vi] Meanwhile, the prize can be seen striving to fulfill other representation-related obligations — pertaining to gender (of writers and judges), visible minorities, and other types of diversity. We can criticize the under-representation of Indigenous authors on its lists precisely because we expect the Giller to include our nation’s margins — the writing of its peripheries as well as its centre. The kinds of criticism touched on above also suggests that the Giller has an obligation to support Canadian-owned, independent publishing houses. This is why its long-lists and shortlists are assiduously checked for the presence of small Canadian presses by those reporting on the nation’s literary culture.^[vii]

The Scotiabank Giller Prize: How Canadian provides analyses of trends and transformations based on quantitative data with a view to assessing the Giller’s performance in response to claims (made in both scholarly and journalistic venues) that the award has failed to be sufficiently representative or inclusive. The same section also functions as an overview of the hundreds of books that comprise the Giller’s catalogue of nominated and winning authors. The analyses of trends in particular will assist anyone wishing to engage in an informed discussion of the Giller and its books. Crucially, what is demonstrated is the Giller’s changeability and adaptability — its responsiveness to the economic and sociopolitical matrix surrounding it. In particular, we see that the growing diversity among books the Giller has long- and shortlisted (more noticeably since 2006) increasingly accords with public discourses calling for diversity and inclusivity in the arts, and the corresponding changes in federal and provincial arts funding. The latter are integral to the types of conditions — the larger context — governing cultural production in Canada.

The problematic of the Giller remains, it must be stressed, and this problematic involves long- and shortlists, winning books, their publishers, and readers/audiences. Nominated and winning books are a source of valuable insight. They shed light on how their authors ‘imagine’ Canada, which ideas/images judges deem most relevant to the largest number of Canadian (or foreign) consumers, and how some constructions of the nation’s reading public compete with or even dominate others. Any inquiry into the Giller must engage with these quandaries, particularly in view of the Giller’s present-day courting of large swathes of Canadian consumers (a facet of popularity is homogeneity). Additional reasons for questioning the Giller’s administration arise from the difficulty of reconciling its mandate with the absence of French-language contenders (fiction in French is not eligible if it is not translated into English), the under-representation of Indigenous authors, the imposition of entry fees which act to exclude small, independent (ironically, Canadian) publishers, and, finally, its intention to turn itself into an international-caliber prize. These and other concerns necessarily prompt efforts to ascertain how much of Canada is being portrayed in Giller books, and which Canadas/Canadians have the least representation in its celebrated narratives.

While this project’s overriding concern is with the Giller Prize, there are significant differences between the chapters, their aims and corresponding approaches. One chapter departs from the investigation of a single prize to look at the broader cultural and technological forces affecting current-day prize culture — the mix of celebrity, marketing, and cultural policy that constitute the national (now internationalized) literary field. Different vantage points for examining the high-stakes, competitive arena of literary prizes are needed if one is to arrive at a clear understanding of prizes as institutions that operate strategically to satisfy a large number demands and interests when they stage events and opt to advocate for certain books and authors.

Despite the different approaches, a number of constants should be apparent. For instance, the notion that prestige is cultural capital and a source of power/influence is applied throughout. This approach informs the premise that the Giller maneuvers, as all ambitious prizes do, to achieve the highest possible cultural clout. It explains why this form of cultural capital can be leveraged in a variety of ways in an economy of prestige — by institutions, judges, authors distinguished by awards, and their publishers. It also encourages us to look at the implications of prize culture for those, authors especially, working with and against it.

Global/Local Contrariety

Another recurrent theme in The Scotiabank Giller Prize: How Canadian, and an organizing principles of this project, is the tension between the local/national and the global/international, which plays out at different levels of institutional decision-making and with different degrees of nuance. Prizes like the Giller epitomize this tension by constructing themselves as national awards while striving for international repute. For James English the latter ambition is typical of deterritorializing tendencies, which manifest themselves in the fiction (in themes and settings) that prizes esteem because they are bound to appeal to international as well as Canadian readers, and in the use of award-winning foreign judges who are presumably more acquainted with international literary trends and preoccupations.

A crucial dimension of the national/global contrariety is the influence exerted by a network of powerful international prizes with the collective capacity to establish literary and aesthetic trends, and influence national scales of value.  In The Economy of Prestige, English argued that “world” prizes increasingly determine (or cause readjustments in) national literary hierarchies and valuations, and that ambitious national prizes (the Griffin included) that aspire to the renown of “world” prizes, remake their own criteria to reflect the kinds of work being distinguished on the world stage. This internationalized economy of prestige competes with — or is in tension with — the requirement to leverage national capital through the narration and celebration of the life of the nation. From a slightly different angle, it is not just that the “markets for literary esteem” are international and international-izing (an aspect of cultural globalization); it is that prizes like the Giller are inexorably hooked into their system of values/rankings, their discourses and rationales — including those that identify and celebrate particular types of texts. By aspiring to compete in both the local and global “symbolic economies,” prizes like the Giller are as much subject to the decisions of other major prizes — because of the publicity and journalistic, critical, and scholarly work surrounding them — as they are bound to shape opinion through their own accumulated authority or cultural capital.

Finally, the relationship between prizes like the Giller and the literature that prizes succeed in mainstreaming can be made more explicit. Prizes play a role in crystallizing and certifying certain features of the books they distinguish (although they do this in conjunction with critical and scholarly work). In fact, their contribution to a cogent rubric for describing texts, and as a touchstone for appraising them, must be fully understood to appreciate their role in canon formation. As a prestigious and influential institution, and one that embodies the tensions described above, the Giller performs this vital role. This too is an important dimension of the Giller’s 30-year-old corpus of winning and nominated books.

I hope that this study demonstrates that opportunities for conceptualization and analysis across a number of contiguous disciplines are many. For this reason I ask readers to keep in mind that this project was envisioned as a starting point. It is an attempt to come to grips with a multifaceted subject, and with its narrow and broad parameters. From the outset, I have tried to ascertain what theoretical ground existed already, and what new development was possible. The project encouraged me to delve into a number of what are generally considered discrete scholarly fields. Finding my bearings within them was challenging. I apologize in advance for any and all shortcomings. At the same time, it has been extremely rewarding to discover ways that connect a study of prizes with other fields — for example, with the field of popular culture, its subfields of media and televisual studies, and the new but burgeoning field of social media. Other connections are made in The Scotiabank Giller Prize: How Canadian, but these are obvious and do not require elaboration. Yet numerous additional avenues for researching and theorizing the Giller and prizes in general remain. I hope that the approaches taken here will encourage others to refine and expand on this and similar projects.

References

Bennett, Tony. Outside Literature. 1st ed., Routledge, 1990, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203987407.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field.

— Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Dewar, Elaine. “How Canada Sold Out Its Publishing Industry.” The Walrus: Books & Fiction, Jun 8, 2017. Internet. June 4, 2018 <https://thewalrus.ca/no-one-blinked/>

English, F. James. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005.

Genette, Gerard, et al. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993.

Narbonne, Andre. (2013). “Review of Roberts, Gillian, Prizing Literature: Celebration and Circulation of National Culture.” H-Canada, H-Net Reviews. https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/englishpub/16

Roberts, Gillian. Prizing Literature: The Celebration and Circulation of National  Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011.

Todd, Richard. Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today London: Bloomsbury, 1996.

York, Lorraine. Literary Celebrity in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007.

— “‘He should do well on the American talk shows‘: Celebrity publishing, and the future of Canadian literature.” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000): 96-105.

Endnotes

^[i]This books takes a Bourdieusian approach (Bourdieu, 1930-2002) to theorizing cultural prestige as cultural capital and a source of influence in a competitive and hierarchical sphere of activity. See Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production (1993) and The Rules of Art (1996).

^[ii]“Market forces” consist of many things, including marketing, book sales, and the unique dynamic of celebrity created by literary prizes. For Todd, canon formation is a process that registers and responds, considerably more than in the past, to the celebrity achieved by authors or by particular works among literate segments of the public. Todd’s focus on the impact of present-day prizes risks undervaluing the importance of literary prizes in the past, however. A historical analysis of prize culture would have to acknowledge the career-defining effects of prizes like the Dodd, Mead and Company Best Novel of the Year Award, and the Atlantic Monthly prize for fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. Martha Ostenso won the former in 1925 for Wild Geese, and Mazo de la Roche received the latter prize in 1927 for Jalna. See Lorraine York’s Literary Celebrity in Canada (2007).

^[iii]See Andre Narbonne’s review (2013) of Gillian Roberts’s book with respect to the “construction of values” and  “paratext[s]”: “Roberts argues that literary prizes are paratexts that significantly influence the way prize-winning novels are understood as cultural markers” (Narbonne 1).

^[iv]See John Guillory’s Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation,  38-9.

^[v]Entirely pertinent to the discussion here is the Giller’s February 18, 2020 announcement that it was nominated for three Canadian Screen awards. One of the nominations was in the category of Best Live Entertainment Special. On May 6, the Giller announced it had won two of these “televisual” awards: “Shelagh O’Brien won for Best Direction, Lifestyle or Information and Rick Mercer won for Best Host, Live Entertainment Special.”

^[vi]This is an aspect of the Giller’s cultural clout, which draws its power from the importance ascribed to what Gillian Roberts, in Prizing Literature, refers to as “national capital.”

^[vii]If accurate, Elaine Dewar’s stats (appearing in a June 2017 article published in the Walrus magazine), furnish the context for such expectations. To summarize her main point: “Multinational-owned publishing houses utterly dominate the Canadian publishing marketplace in spite of decades of support for Canadian-owned entities, and laws and policies aimed at changing that balance” (Dewar np).

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Olga Stein holds a PhD in English, and is a university and college instructor. She has taught writing, communications, modern and contemporary Canadian and American literature. Her research focuses on the sociology of literary prizes. A manuscript of her book, The Scotiabank Giller Prize: How Canadian is now with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Stein is working on her next book, tentatively titled, Wordly Fiction: Literary Transnationalism in Canada. Before embarking on a PhD, Stein served as the chief editor of the literary review magazine, Books in Canada, and from 2001 to 2008 managed the amazon.com-Books in Canada First Novel Award (now administered by Walrus magazine). Stein herself contributed some 150 reviews, 60 editorials, and numerous author interviews to Books in Canada (the online version is available at http://www.booksincanada.com). A literary editor and academic, Stein has relationships with writers and scholars from diverse communities across Canada, as well as in the US. Stein is interested in World Literature, and authors who address the concerns that are now central to this literary category: the plight of migrants, exiles, and the displaced, and the ‘unbelonging’ of Indigenous peoples and immigrants. More specifically, Stein is interested in literary dissidents, and the voices of dissent, those who challenge the current political, social, and economic status quo. Stein is the editor of the memoir, Playing Under The Gun: An Athlete’s Tale of Survival in 1970s Chile by Hernán E. Humaña.

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