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Jack Rabinovitch, Founder of Canadian Literary Award, Dies at 87

Jack Rabinovitch presenting the Scotiabank Giller Prize to the author Johanna Skibsrud in 2010.Credit...Mark Blinch/Reuters

Jack Rabinovitch, founder of the pre-eminent prize in Canada for English-language literature, died on Sunday in Toronto. He was 87.

His daughter Noni Rabinovitch said Mr. Rabinovitch had been hospitalized since Thursday after falling down stairs in his house. He never regained consciousness, she said.

Aside from an early fling with journalism followed by a spell as a speechwriter for a grocery store magnate in Montreal, Mr. Rabinovitch did not make his living with words. His fortune came from the commercial real estate industry.

But his life remained connected to the country’s literary scene, and he became most widely known for setting up the Giller Prize in 1994 as a memorial to his second wife, Doris Giller, a prominent literary journalist in Toronto and Montreal. She had died of cancer the year before.

In a 2014 interview with The McGill Reporter, a publication of McGill University in Montreal, Mr. Rabinovitch recalled a meeting at Woody’s, a Montreal pub, at which he enlisted Mordecai Richler, the novelist and his friend since high school, to help set up the prize.

“Mordecai suggested that we include David Staines, an eminent English professor and scholar,” Mr. Rabinovitch said. “And over chopped liver at Moishes on the Main, the Giller Prize took form. David then suggested we include Alice Munro in the founding group, and after Alice agreed, we went public.”

Ms. Munro, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, also became part of Mr. Rabinovitch’s circle of friends.

Giller Prize jurors sift through about 150 books to pick a short list of about a dozen, and being named to the panel is almost as great an honor in Canadian literary circles as winning the award itself.

“He wanted a prize that would create a sense of competition,” said Bob Rae, the former premier of Ontario, former leader of the federal Liberal Party and another of Mr. Rabinovitch’s friends and tennis partners.

Mr. Rabinovitch was born on June 24, 1930, to Isaac Rabinovitch and the former Fanny Shulman in Montreal. They lived in a hardscrabble, largely Jewish section of the city (Mr. Richler drew on experiences there for his 1971 novel “St. Urbain’s Horseman”), and Isaac Rabinovitch ran a diner and a newsstand before opening a toy store.

After studying at McGill and briefly working as a reporter, Mr. Rabinovitch became a speechwriter for Sam Steinberg, the head of a grocery store empire that was broken up after his death in 1978. At Trizec, a real estate company formed initially to build Place Ville Marie, a downtown Montreal office complex, Mr. Rabinovitch became executive vice president in charge of the company’s hotel, office tower and retail developments in eastern North America.

His marriage to Zipporah Dunsky, whom he met shortly after graduating from high school, ended in divorce in 1971. She was the executive director of the Jewish Public Library in Montreal.

In addition to his daughter Noni, Mr. Rabinovitch is survived by two other daughters, Daphna and Elana, all from his first marriage; a sister, Shirley Edith Coleman, and his partner, Judy Clarke.

The book award, known since 2005 as the Scotiabank Giller Prize, gives the winner 100,000 Canadian dollars (about $79,000 in the United States). The awards ceremony is televised by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

In the 2014 interview, Mr. Rabinovitch attributed the prize’s prominence to its independence from government and other large organizations.

“We’re in the very fortunate position of not having to be politically correct, or beholden to any institution or individual about how we run this show,” he said. The jury’s only instruction, he said, is to “choose the best book of Canadian fiction of the year.”

Follow Ian Austen on Twitter: @ianrausten

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Jack Rabinovitch, 87, Founder of Most Prominent Award for Literature in Canada. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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