A pro-Palestine writer has pledged to use his Baillie Gifford literary prize money to protest against the award itself.
The investment management company sponsors Britain’s highest honour for non-fiction, but has been criticised by activists over its financial links to fossil fuels and Israel.
Those being honoured this year have now weighed into the row, with a runner-up declaring he will use his winnings to campaign against the company and the winner refusing to accept his prize over Baillie Gifford’s fossil fuel investments.
Writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, who was awarded £5,000 as a runner-up, has pledged to use the cash to protest against the company’s supposed links to Israel.
After being commended for his memoir A Man of Two Faces, he took to Instagram to state that Palestinians were the victims of a “genocide” in the conflict and that Baillie Gifford should cut any financial ties with Israel.
The company has previously stated that these ties amount to investments in companies, like Amazon, that do “tiny” amounts of business there.
Writing on social media, Mr Nguyen spoke of the “need to speak out against every form of injustice without exception, whether our people are the victims or whether our people are the victimisers, whether it is a genocide committed in the past against Jews or in the present against Palestinians”.
He added: “Baillie Gifford should divest from fossil fuels and its investments in Israeli companies that benefit from the occupation of Palestine.”
The writer pledged to donate his prize money to We Are Not Numbers, an organisation that provides writing workshops for Palestinians.
The organisation is overseen by the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, a non-profit human rights group, .
His social media post, and his Instagram account, appear to have been later deleted.
Mr Nguyen, 53, is a South Vietnamese-born American novelist whose debut, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016.
That year, he also spoke out in favour of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which seeks to effectively boycott Israel.
He said at the time: “One of those contemporary injustices that we struggle to remember is the Israeli occupation and the deprivation of Palestinian rights.”