2024 Winners

Judges' Comments

POETRY - Cassidy McFadzean

As I read through more than one hundred and thirty entries, I found myself returning to a group of twenty-five to thirty poems, impressed by their range of ideas and emotions. It was incredibly challenging to narrow down this list, and I’m grateful to spend time with so many finely crafted poems, attuned to musicality, form, and imagery. The poems I selected moved me in their vulnerability, exuberance, and humour.

The winning poem, “Of the Internees Who Stayed in New Denver, BC,” is a haunting elegy paying tribute to Japanese-Canadians who were incarcerated in internment camps—and remained. The poem is interspersed with questions that destabilize its evenly crafted couplets: “What is acceptance but letting defeat enter your home / as a guest, not a victor?” I was drawn to the precision of images veering into one another, the “green tea like shreds of nori submerged / in the bottom of porcelain cups,” which gives a sense of the present capsizing into the past. The final image of a door “locked from the other side” rejects neat resolutions, instead allowing the injustices experienced by Japanese-Canadians to linger.

The second place poem, “Vespertilio Proclivity,” is a whirling tour de force that examines a speaker’s concussion through the inventive conceit of bats, playfully described as “furry brown prayer books / zip lining dusk.” The poem’s propulsive energy shifts from monostichs to fractured prose to sestets, emulating a bat’s dizzying flight path. The speaker’s cravings for their former life are described in musically taut lines: “still, I madly crave sugared pastries with holes, salivate / at whiffs of time gone astray.” This poem’s “tangled circuitry” reminds us that healing happens at its own pace—but we’re fortunate to be along for the ride. 

The third place poem, “Some Questions,” gripped me from its strange and compelling opening, “Is it too late to wash the plastic container filled with gross fluffy mold.” The poem leaps from the mundane to the existential, articulating life’s uncertainties and offering a playful rebuttal to a culture of self-optimization: “Is there a preferred version of you that I can access some other way.” In eschewing question marks, these lines land like ironic observations, only partially masking the relatable anxiety that the time to make the best decision is running out: “Am I usually wrong about things. / Would it change things, knowing this.”

FICTION - Danny Ramadan

It was an honour reading the stories offered by such a range of authors and storytellers. The community of authors that I had the pleasure of reading offered journeys to travel on and fields to meander upon. I was engulfed with many of the stories: pushing a father’s wheelchair down a hospice’s home, trying to steal back a cat from a movie starlet, and crossing a bridge in New York City with a bolt-cutter on shoulder. The authors were vastly different, yet they all shared a keen eye for detail, and a wonderful sense of pleasure writing these stories. Thank you to all of those who submitted. 

In First Place: “The End Times.” A teacher navigates Halloween day in her school while clutching to her dream of pregnancy. A deeply felt story on motherhood, religion, intersectionality, and connections, this piece manages a delicate balance between snippets of a character’s life, mixed with unflinching truths about our inner thoughts as marginalized bodies. The author writes with strength and intention about inner traumas, yet has a wicked sense of humour as well. 

In Second Place: “Meat Market.” A gay man navigates his place in Toronto’s queer scene, while fading into a relationship with an older gentleman. The quiet, calm, and meandering narrative invites the reader right into the mind of the protagonist, and slowly fuses us into his (many misguided) decisions. The voice is unique, sharp and witty, and the dialogue is masterful.

In Third Place: “Multiple Unexceptional Women.” A woman uncovering layers upon layers of mediocracy within the man she is dating. This author knows how to hook the reader into a narrative, then leave them hanging. There were moments where we can’t help ourselves but to demand a resolution from the protagonist: confront him, we might shout. Leave him, we might insist. But the author knows that good things come to those who wait, and a good narrative is made with patience and intent.