More Than a Hundred Writers Are Saying No to Indigo

By Andy — 2026-10-30 — Literary News

Over a hundred Canadian writers—Viet Thanh Nguyen among them, Mosab Abu Toha, Daniel José Older—have signed an open letter pledging not to promote Indigo Books or appear at any event the chain sponsors. They're calling it simple: a boycott.

The tension isn't new. It's been simmering since at least 2006.

What's different now is the scale of it, and the fact that serious literary names are putting their names to paper. Indigo is Canada's largest bookstore. Not a struggling independent. Not a regional player. The place where most Canadian readers still buy books, more or less.

The boycott centres on CEO Heather Reisman and her husband Gerald Schwartz, who together founded the HESEG Foundation. That foundation offers scholarships and living expense grants to foreign nationals who enlist in the Israeli military—what they call "lone soldiers." Reisman and Schwartz donate roughly five million dollars annually to fund these scholarships and grants.

This is a factual thing. It's not disputed.

What the boycott is saying is that a major Canadian bookstore's profits are being funneled directly into incentivizing foreign recruitment for another country's armed forces. And not just any armed forces—one that occupies territory and, according to the signatories, is engaged in genocide in Gaza.

The authors' letter is blunt about numbers. The Lancet projects over 200,000 deaths in Gaza since October 2023. Children account for nearly half those deaths. That's the thing they're responding to—not abstract politics, but those figures.

Actually, that's not quite right. It's both the abstract and the concrete. It's the mechanism. It's that you can walk into Indigo on Queen Street and buy a novel while, somewhere, your money is moving toward something you find unconscionable. It's that contradiction.

The Giller Prize—Canada's most prestigious and lucrative literary award—already walked away. In 2025, after years of pressure from the Canadian literary community, they ended their sponsorship deal with Indigo. Reisman has shown no sign of selling her shares or stepping down as director of HESEG.

Which is why the authors' demands are stark. Either Reisman and Schwartz dissolve the foundation entirely, or they sell all their shares in Indigo. No middle ground.

It raises an uncomfortable question for everyone who buys books: what does it actually mean to support a bookstore?

Source: "HESEG provides scholarships and support for living expenses to former IDF lone soldiers, who are recruits with no family or support system in Israel." — CBC News