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.