When a video of writer and poet Ian Williams recently appeared in my news feed, I was curious about what he had to say.
I first met Williams about six years ago at a poetry workshop he facilitated.. He was kind and generous and even offered to stay in touch. Years later, when I posted publicly about my struggles as a writer, he messaged me privately to offer encouragement. He was, without question, the first established writer to affirm my writing life.
Having watched the short clip of Williams, I was disappointed. However, to avoid jumping to conclusions, I listened to the full interview. By the end, I was filled with anger and disgust.
On Nov. 19, one day after the Giller Prize gala, where $100,000 is awarded to a novelist each year, Williams appeared on the CBC radio show Commotion to discuss what host Elamin Abdelmahmoud called “the rift in CanLit.” The previous night, Williams had briefly stepped outside of the gala to watch the authors and other arts workers who were picketing on the sidewalk.
These workers were continuing their boycott of the Giller Prize over is sponsors Scotiabank, which holds a large investment in Israeli weapons maker Elbit Systems, Indigo for its owners’ charity that supports lone soldiers who enlist in the Israeli military, and the Azrieli Foundation for its connection to the Azrieli Group real estate company which operates in the occupied West Bank. People held banners, chanted and handed out leaflets about why authors were refusing to take part in the artwashing of genocide in Palestine.
According to Williams, the crowd urged him to join them, chanting “join us, join us!” When he declined and began to walk back into the gala, the chants turned to cries of “Shame! Shame!”
“For a moment,” he told Abdelmahmoud, “there was a possibility that I could be an ally in a way that was recognizable to the group, but when I didn’t do that, again, I became the enemy.”
Listening to this interview, several things struck me.
Firstly, the idea that Williams ‘could have been an ally’ in that moment is misleading. For the past year, the CanLit Responds campaign has clearly stated its demand for the Giller Prize to cut its ties with sponsors that are complicit in genocide. The campaign has done this through its website, social media posts, op-eds, demonstrations, and more. Amid these numerous interventions, including the core action in which several of Williams’ peers withdrew their books from consideration for the Giller, Williams has continued to support the prize, even serving as a host for this year’s gala.
When Williams frames the picket line as a missed opportunity, he’s overlooking his past year of choices. He’s asking listeners to focus on his brief circling back to the picket line but not his initial crossing of it.
When Williams frames the picket line as a missed opportunity, he’s overlooking his past year of choices. He’s asking listeners to focus on his brief circling back to the picket line but not his initial crossing of it.
Secondly, I was struck by the contempt in William’s words. Williams is a scholar of words and has won numerous honours for his precision with — you guessed it — words. His currency is words.
When Williams calls a protest a “small group of writers” with “small chants,” it’s deliberate. When he does not say the word “genocide” once during a 25-minute interview, instead offering “thing,” “suffering” and “war,” it’s deliberate. When he compares his own personal misfortune (the loss of an uncle on his birthday) to what is happening in Gaza, it’s deliberate.
Through his involvement with the Giller Prize, Williams was offered access to a national, mainstream platform. This was not offered to organizers of CanLit Responds. Williams used this opportunity to diminish the efforts of writers and book workers calling for an end to genocide.
Thirdly, Williams advances several bad faith arguments. He calls into question the campaign’s tactics, asking “would this have worked if it had happened not via protest but through conversation with the leaders of the Giller Prize? We don’t know.” But in reality, the answers are easily found.
When demonstrators disrupted the gala in 2023, Giller Prize organizers reportedly pushed for the police to press charges. In the days following the protest, the Giller Prize’s executive director, Elana Rabinovitch, chided the protesters for “showing disrespect to Canadian authors, and their literary achievements.” (Last year’s winner, Sarah Bernstein, and 2,500 other authors signed a letter supporting those protesters.) Proponents of “working from within” will ask, “Well, what was the gala supposed to do, let protesters take over the event?” However, the past year reveals the emptiness of the work-from-within promise.
2016 Giller winner Madeleine Thien reached out to Rabinovitch in the spring of 2024 in conversation and via email to broach the subject of divestment. However, as Thien outlines in a public letter, despite being led to believe by Rabinovitch that the Giller Foundation was severing its ties with Scotiabank, the foundation ultimately renewed its commitment to Scotiabank, and Rabinovitch began levying allegations of antisemitism against Thien and other writers. Similarly, in a now deleted post on X, Rabinovitch amplified an article attacking former Giller winner David Bergen, who has spoken in support of the boycott.
What would happen if they were inside the room? The past year provides clues: their demands would be ignored, they’d be subjected to online attacks, and their integrity would be questioned.
Thus, Williams’s appeal to incrementalism is a two-fold denial: it rejects the histories wherein collective action and civil disobedience have effected change and, relatedly, ignores the many instances in which change-from-within has been ineffective and even counterproductive.
In Canada, despite decades of consultations, reports, and subcommittees, Black Canadians continue to face discrimination in education, health care, employment, criminal justice, housing and more. Clearly, no amount of education, acclaim, or respectability can insulate Black people from the ravages of white supremacy. One would have hoped that Williams would have brought some of this context to bear during his interview.
Individual feelings, complicated as they may be, are not relevant here. Rather, the urgent matter is, as Omar El Akkad recently stated, paraphrasing Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi, to “do anything you can do to throw sand in the gears of genocide.”
The chants outside of the Giller gala were a reminder to all within earshot: the “thing” to which Williams referred is not a thing, nor a war, nor a rift. This is a genocide.
We must never deny this fact.
This article appeared in the 2024 Dec - 2025 Jan issue.