Writers’ Trust Awards to be handed out at Toronto ceremony tonight

A customer shops at a bookstore in Portland, Maine, on Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

TORONTO — Some of Canadian literature’s best and brightest will converge on Toronto this evening for the annual Writers’ Trust Awards.

Mattea Roach will host the ceremony, during which the organization will hand out hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money.

That includes $70,000 to the winner of the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and $75,000 to the recipient of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

This year’s fiction finalists include the short story collections “Graveyard Shift at the Lemonade Stand” by Tim Bowling and “Simple Creatures” by Robert McGill.

The novels in contention for the fiction prize are “We, the Kindling” by Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, “Endling” by Maria Reva and “Julius Julius” by Aurora Stewart de Peña.

The non-fiction finalists are Miriam Toews for “A Truce That Is Not Peace,” Omar El Akkad for “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” Tessa McWatt for “The Snag: A Mother, A Forest, and Wild Grief;” Vinh Nguyen for The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse," and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson for “Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead.”

The livestreamed ceremony will begin at 6:30 p.m.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 13, 2025.

Nicole Thompson, The Canadian Press