Giller Foundation announces new scholarships for Black, Indigenous and racialized high-school students

Open this photo in gallery:

The Giller Foundation is teaming up with real estate firm Mantella Corp. to launch three annual $10,000 scholarships for Black, Indigenous and racialized high-school students planning to study creative writing and literature.

The organizations will offer the Giller Mantella Scholarship for three years, with the possibility of extending it beyond that. Applications will open for the first cohort in March, 2024. The program will be administered by Scholarship Partners Canada, a wing of Universities Canada, which does higher-education advocacy and scholarship management.

Named after literary journalist Doris Giller, the Giller Foundation was founded by her husband Jack Rabinovitch in 1994 to celebrate Canadian fiction authors with an annual $25,000 prize. Now worth $100,000 and sponsored by the Bank of Nova Scotia, the Scotiabank Giller Prize has in recent years been awarded to authors including Suzette Mayr, Omar El Akkad, Souvankham Thammavongsa and Ian Williams.

Williams said in an interview that the scholarships would be a welcome counterbalance to the surge of attention toward science, math and technical degrees. It would give young people for whom creative work might seem like an out-of-reach luxury – a fact of life for many racialized students – a chance to steer their life in the direction they want, he said.

“The consequences of not pursuing an artistic life or a creative life is you get all these people in midlife who are frustrated, where they haven’t been creative or expressive,” Williams said. “If you cross that with race, and other kinds of pressures, with no creative outlet, it becomes even worse.”

Elana Rabinovitch, the Giller Foundation’s executive director, said she and the organization had been considering establishing scholarships for quite some time, but needed to arrange a sponsor and administrator – eventually finding them in the philanthropist Sylvia Mantella and in Universities Canada.

Racialized writers have seen more promotion from Canada’s literary world more recently – they accounted for the entirety of the Giller shortlist last year. Rabinovitch said the scholarships would help contribute to “a cultural revolution that, to my mind, reflects the true face of Canada.”

The arrival of COVID-19 in 2020, she added, “really laid bare how big the fissures of racial, economic and class divides were.” Beyond the inequitable access to vaccination, care and COVID-safe spaces, “equal opportunity in the arts, in postsecondary education – especially in remote and rural communities – was not always available.”

The scholarships are the latest step in an attempt to expand the Giller Foundation’s work beyond its namesake prize, including year-round virtual and live events and partnerships with Indigo and the audiobook platform Audible.