Sarah Bernstein wins $100K Scotiabank Giller Prize for novel Study for Obedience

Sarah Bernstein has won the 2023Scotiabank Giller Prize for her novelStudy for Obedience.

The $100,000 prize is the richest in Canadian literature.

Bernstein is a Montreal-born author and creative writing teacher currently living in Scotland. She joined the evening virtually, as she had given birth to a new baby merely 10 days prior.

"Ireally, really couldn't believe it,"she told CBC Books in an interview shortly after her win."I'm having difficulty still assimilating information, butyou sort of feel like it's a joke someone's playing on you or something."

"I haven't slept very much in about 10 days. So Ithink the sense of surreality is just continuing. The edges of everything are just a bitblurry."

In her acceptance speech, she said, "I'm really privileged to have been afforded the opportunity to tell this storyand I think often nowhow important it is more than ever to support writers in material ways to tell the stories of their own people in their own ways, especially when their stories challenge dominant historical narratives."

Her other books include her 2021 novelThe Coming Bad Daysand her collection of prose poemsNow Comes the Lightning.Bernstein was namedone of Granta'sbest young British novelists in 2023.

Study for Obedienceis alsoshortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize.

Creating shape in fiction

Study for Obedienceexplores themes of guilt, abuse and prejudice through the eyes of its unreliable narrator. In it, a woman leaves her hometown to move to a "remote northern country"to be a housekeeper for her brother, whose wife recently decided to leave him. Soon after her arrival the community is struck by unusual events, from collective bovine hysteria to a potato blight. When the locals direct their growing suspicions of newcomersat her, their hostility grows more palpable.

• Read an excerpt fromStudy for Obedience

"She can't imagine what a life should be or what a life should look like. In the first instance, she looks to her family to tell her how to be, and then as she gets older, she has invested a lot, although she doesn't talk about it very much, in her attempt to have a career as a journalist,"Bernstein said in an interview with CBC'sThe Next Chapter.

"I was thinking a bit about what it means when you invest so much in your personality, in a career that feels like a vocation, but you can't make it in that career oryou can't get a kind of security in that. She ends up leaving it and that too doesn't give shape to her life. That's partly why she goes back to live with her brother, because she's still looking for that external validation, for the world to press against her and create a shape for her rather than vice versa."

"The stories that people tell about themselves and their own histories are really powerful," she told CBC Books."They can do a lot of damage; they can put a lot of distance between people. But I think one of the things that I was interested in, too, is the way that the book gestures towards a potentially reparative function of storytelling in the sense of the story's capacity to hold different realities or different truths alongside one another, even if that relation is very uneasy."

LISTEN | Sarah Bernstein's Study for Obedience explores power and complicity:

The Next Chapter12:46Sarah Bernsteins Study for Obedience explores power and complicity

Bernstein's fellow finalists include Kevin Chong, Eleanor Catton, Dionne Irving and CS Richardson.

Canadian poet and fiction writer Ian Williams was chair ofthe five-person jury this year. He was joined byCanadian authors Sharon Bala, Brian Thomas Isaac and international authors Rebecca Makkai and Neel Mukherjee. Publishers submitted 145 titles for consideration, which was narrowed down to a12-title longlistbefore the reveal of the five-book shortlist.

In a statement, the jury said:"The modernist experiment continues to burn incandescently in Sarah Bernstein's slim novel,Study for Obedience. Bernstein asks the indelible question: what does a culture of subjugation, erasure and dismissal of women produce? In this book, equal parts poisoned and sympathetic, Bernstein's unnamed protagonist goes about exacting, in shockingly twisted ways, the price of all that the world has withheld from her. The prose refracts Javier Maras sometimes, at other times Samuel Beckett. It's an unexpected and fanged book, and its own studied withholdings create a powerful mesmeric effect."

Protesters interrupt broadcast

This year's televised in-person gala in Toronto was hosted by comedian, TV personality and author Rick Mercer. The broadcast was interrupted twice byprotesters. The first time was early on in the broadcast, when protesters shouted and jumped onstage with signs that read, "ScotiabankFunds Genocide." The second time was shoutingjust as Bernstein's name was called,forcing organizers to repeat the announcement.

The protesters wereescorted out by police, but the CBC broadcast kept cameras off the incident.

Pro-Palestinian groups have taken issue with Scotiabank's investment in Elbit Systems Ltd., an Israeli arms firm.

Toronto police have charged three people involved in the protest. Investigators allege the three people, who range in age from 23 to 25, used forged documents to gain access to the invitation-only literary event at the Four Seasons Hotel.

All three face charges of obstructing property and using forged documents, and are due back in court in January.

WATCH | Protesters interrupt the Giller Prize awards ceremony:

Protesters interrupt 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize gala

11 months ago

Duration 0:24

Protesters took to the stage at the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize broadcast, which was hosted by Rick Mercer. As It Happens host Nil Kksal was in the audience and took this video from inside the ballroom at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto.

Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch founded the prize in honour of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller, in 1994. Rabinovitchdied in 2017 at the age of 87.

Last year's winner wasSuzette Mayrfor her novelThe Sleeping Car Porter.

• Suzette Mayr's novelThe Sleeping Car Porteruses magic realism to highlight Black Canadian history

Other past Giller Prize winners include:

• Omar El AkkadforWhat Strange Paradise.
• Souvankham ThammavongsaforHow to Pronounce Knife.
• Esi EdugyanforWashington Black.
• Michael RedhillforBellevue Square.
• Margaret AtwoodforAlias Grace.
• Mordecai RichlerforBarney's Version.
• Alice MunroforRunaway.
• Andr AlexisforFifteen Dogs.
• Madeleine ThienforDo Not Say We Have Nothing.