Celebrated Canadian author Margaret Atwood, left, has accepted a prestigious Israeli literary prize, despite being urged to boycott it because of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
On Sunday night, Atwood and Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh each were awarded half of the $1-million Dan David Prize at Tel Aviv University (TAU).
The novelists both faced pressure from their peers to refuse it.
In an interview with Bloomberg News prior to the award ceremony, Atwood said: “We don’t do cultural boycotts,” adding that “I would be throwing overboard the thousands of writers around the world who are in prison, censored, exiled and murdered for what they have published.”
In an open letter to Atwood last week, Rob Maguire, editor of Saskatoon-based Art Threat magazine, called on her to reject the prize so as not to lend support to an Israeli government that “systematically abuses the human rights of Palestinians.”
Numerous similar letters were written to Atwood and Ghosh in the months prior to their acceptance of the prize.
In April, Toronto filmmaker John Greyson – who led the campaign to boycott the Toronto International Film Festival last year because of its special focus on films about Tel Aviv – asked Atwood to decline the prize in order to recognize “the growing boycott movement which is trying to achieve peace in the region.”
In another letter, from the Gaza-based Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI), Atwood was told not to accept the prize because she would be “giving a slight and inadvertent nod to Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide.”
But in a joint response to their detractors posted on Atwood’s blog after their win, Atwood and Ghosh said they were no one’s pawns.
“The letters we have received have ranged from courteous and sad to factual and practical to accusatory, outrageous, and untrue in their claims and statements; some have been frankly libelous, and even threatening. Some have been willing to listen to us, others have not: they want our supposedly valuable ‘names,’ but not our actual voices.”
In their joint acceptance speech, Ghosh and Atwood said novelists don’t deal in absolutes.
“Both of us were urged by some people and groups not to come to Israel on this occasion. We were told that no artist should attend any cultural event here – no matter how hopeful and moderate such an event might be – considering the unequal, unjust, and harsh and dangerous conditions of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories,” Ghosh said.
Atwood continued: “Propaganda deals in absolutes: in yes and no. But the novel is a creature of nuance: of perhaps, of maybe… when we said we felt the urgent necessity of keeping doors open, we were informed that we were deluded, and worse.”
Attempting to put their positions on the Israel-Palestinian issue into context, the novelists said they hoped that all people who “truly want a chance for Palestinian people to be able to live a decent life, to be compensated for what they have wrongfully lost, and for the destruction of their infrastructures – and all those who hope Israelis will be able to live without rocket fire, bombings, and worse – can only wish [peace talks] well, trust that those engaging in them are doing so seriously and in good faith, and hope that a fair and secure two-state solution will finally result.”
The Dan David Prize is awarded annually from an endowment by the Dan David Foundation at TAU.
According to the prize’s website, Atwood was chosen this year for her body of work, most specifically her “three influential dystopian novels – The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003), and The Year of the Flood (2009),” which the site calls “inventive fables about the subjugation of women under regimes of religious fundamentalism and the risks of global calamity brought about by environmental decay, genetic engineering, and the expanding potential for biological terrorism.
“Although these works are futuristic, they envision the dangers made possible by trends of the 20th century and present a self-conscious, fiercely oppositional view to patriarchy.”
Under the conditions of the prize, each author is required to donate 10 per cent of their prize money to graduate students in the literary field.
The CJN’s efforts to contact Atwood for comment were unsuccessful.
