Hollay Ghadery

Join us on Thursday May 28 2026 7:00 pm in Winnipeg, Grant Park in the Atrium at McNally Robinson for Unforgettable Characters: Three Canadian Authors in Conversation, hosted by the resplendent Lindsay Wong! More details below and you can RSVP to the event by clicking the link in my Linktree bio. Streaming on YouTube Join acclaimed author Lindsay Wong, with Zilla Jones, Alison Gadsby, and Hollay Ghadery for an evocative conversation. Their books travel the world and into the minds of unforgettable characters. Find out where they came from, and where they’ll take you. This event will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a YouTube stream. Presented with support from the Writers’ Union of Canada and Canada Council for the Arts. 🫶🏼 Zilla Jones is an award-winning writer, anti-racist educator, lawyer, and singer. Recognized by the CBC Prize, the Journey Prize, the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award, she was also chosen as a Writers’ Trust Rising Star. She lives on Treaty 1 territory. The World So Wide is her debut novel. 🌊 Alison Gadsby lives in Tkaronto, where she hosts Junction Reads, a prose reading series. Her debut novel, Dreams Of The Weary is forthcoming from Palimpsest Press. Breathing is How Some People Stay Alive is her first collection. 🪻 Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer living on Anishinaabe land. The author of an award- winning memoir, Fuse, a collection of poetry, Rebellion Box, a collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, and a chapbook. The Unraveling of Ou is her debut novel. ❤️‍🔥: @mcnallyrobinson @zilla.jones @lindsaywong.m @ay.jay.gee @river_street_writes #winnipeg #winnipegmanitoba #bookishcanadians #bookstagramcanada #ireadcanadian

The fact that anyone chooses to spend any portion of their precious life reading and then responding to my work never ceases to leave me bewildered with gratitude. Thank you to everyone who has supported me and my writing this year and all the years—including Dawn Macdonald and Sara Hailstone, who recently reviewed my chapbook, the blades of grass are dreaming (Anstruther Press, 2025). “The poems in the blades of grass are dreaming are wistful and poignant, with the first-person speaker often seeming to be off to the side in some way, listening, watching, and observing.” —Dawn Macdonald, The Seaboard Review of Books The action of the grass, dreaming, signals an existence of memory, desire and anticipation. The grass contains capacity and the grass is acknowledged. The land is not used, it’s thinking. Anything that dreams, deserves respect. —Sara Hailstone, sarahailstone.com Links to both of the reviews are in my LinkTree bio link. If you’re interested, you can grab my chapbook directly from Anstruther Press (@anstrutherpress ) at . w/ @anstrutherpress @theseaboardreviewofbooks @yukondawnmacdonald @hamartiaandi . . . #chapbook #gratitude #poetry #ketabdoost #readmorepoetry

My book babes. ♥️ ✨Fuse, a memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, published by Guernica Editions, 2021. Won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Drawing on her own experiences as a woman of Iranian and British Isle descent, writer Hollay Ghadery dives into conflicts and uncertainty surrounding the biracial female body and identity, especially as it butts up against the disparate expectations of each culture. Painfully and at times, reluctantly, Fuse probes and explores the documented prevalence of mental health issues in biracial women. 🐝 Rebellion Box, poems, published by Radiant Press, 2023. This explosive debut collection pushes against the limitations of gender roles, race, bodies and minds, and explores our insignificance and impotence in the universe. The concept of otherness afforded by a marginalized and neurodivergent perspective is brilliantly represented in this book. 🩷 Widow Fantasies, flash fiction, published by Gordon Hill Press, 2024. Long listed for the 2025 Toronto Book Awards. Fantasies are places we briefly visit; we can’t live there. The stories in Widow Fantasies deftly explore the subjugation of women through the often subversive act of fantasizing. From a variety of perspectives, through a symphony of voices, Widow Fantasies immerses the reader in the domestic rural gothic, offering up unforgettable stories from the shadowed lives of girls and women. All of these books are available wherever books are bought or borrowed. 💛 @guernicaeditions @radiantpress @ghp_pql #canlit #flashfiction #shortfiction #bookstagram #bookstagramcanada #poetry #poetrycommunity #canadianpoet #canadianpoetry #memoir #nonfiction #biracial #mixedrace #ketabdoost #ketabekhooob #authorsofinstagram📚 #ireadcanadian #writersofinstagram #canadianauthor

#NationalShortStoryMonth feature: Pratap Reddy and his brilliant collection, Remaindered People & Other Stories (Guernica Editions, 2025). Thank you to Pratap for allowing me to share an excerpt from “Dreams of God and Men” on my blog at HollayGhadery.ca. You can click my bio link to go there directly. — “Wake up, Seenu. You must go to work today.” He heard Narsamma speak as if from a far away world. He moved his limbs and opened his eyes. Seenu felt so weak he wanted to sink back into sleep. The paper-thin mattress he was lying on was the only piece of furniture in the room. No windows, only a small concrete grille under the fluted asbestos roof. The only other furnishing was a gorgeous but out-of-date calendar hanging on a wall. —excerpt from “Dreams of God and Men” by Pratap Reddy. — About Remaindered People & Other Stories: The author’s first collection Weather Permitting & Other Stories was centred on the predicament of new immigrants who are coping with the challenges they face immediately upon arrival in Canada. In this new collection, the focus is on the other side of immigration, exploring the often-neglected aspects: the plight of empty nesters left behind in India, parents compelled to immigrate with their adult children, about immigrants returning to their home country for good or for holiday, of people aspiring to migrate but falling by the wayside. Whatever the surrounding circumstances, all the stories are about people on the move, people who often don’t seem to know where they are headed. About Pratap Reddy: An underwriter by day and a writer by night, Pratap Reddy writes about the angst and the agonies (on occasion the ecstasies) of newly arrived immigrants. He is the author of the novel Ramya’s Treasure and the short story collection Weather Permitting & Other Stories (Guernica Editions). Remaindered People is his second collection of short stories. He lives in Mississauga with his wife and son. 💫: @pratapreddycanada @guernicaeditions . . . #shortstory #shortstories #shortfiction #ireadcanadian

These two kids have been married 50 years, can you freakin’ believe it?! I’m hosting a party for them tomorrow and they gamely suggested the theme “50 Years of Hell: Welcome to the BBQ” but I’m not too handy around open flame so I’ve opted to forgo the charcoal and whip up some tea sandwiches. Happy anniversary, Mom & Dad! ❤️‍🔥 @ggeakins . . . #wedding #70sfashion #weddinganniversary #eshgh #khanevade

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it,— if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves in the grass.” —George Eliot, from Mill on the Floss. #favouritequotes #georgeeliot #gardening #tulipseason #starmagnolia

In this NBN episode, I speak with Jinwoo Park about his novel, Oxford Soju Club (Dundurn Press, 2025). To listen to the conversation, click my bio link and go to my NBN host page. A SHELF AWARENESS BEST BOOK OF 2025 • A CBC BOOKS BEST CANADIAN FICTION BOOK OF 2025 • A CRIMEREADS BEST BOOK OF 2025 The natural enemy of a Korean is another Korean. When North Korean spymaster Doha Kim is mysteriously killed in Oxford, his protégé, Yohan Kim, chases the only breadcrumb given to him in Doha’s last breath: “Soju Club, Dr. Ryu.” In the meantime, a Korean American CIA agent , Yunah Choi, races to salvage her investigation of the North Korean spy cell in the aftermath of the assassination. At the centre of it all is the Soju Club, the only Korean restaurant in Oxford, owned by Jihoon Lim, an immigrant from Seoul in search of a new life after suffering a tragedy. As different factions move in with their own agendas, their fates become entangled, resulting in a bitter struggle that will determine whose truth will triumph. Oxford Soju Club weaves a tale of how immigrants in the Korean diaspora are forced to create identities to survive, and how in the end, they must shed those masks and seek their true selves. Jinwoo Park is a Korean Canadian writer based in Montreal. He completed a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Oxford, and currently works as a marketer in the tech industry. In 2021, he won the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award. Oxford Soju Club is his first novel. 💚: @jinwoopark0721 @dundurnpress @newbooksnetwork #koreanliterature #korean #soju #mysterybooks #spythriller

So many babies to love. ♥️ . . . #eshgh #khanevade #joonam #momming #furfam

one more from The Unravelling of Ou by Hollay Ghadery #books #bookstagram

The Unravelling of Ou by Hollay Ghadery, released February 15, 2026 from Palimpsest Press.  The highly-anticipated debut novel from award-winning Iranian-Canadian author Hollay Ghadery. Moving on is hard. Even harder when it’s from a make-believe friend—someone, or in this instance, some thing—who’s been your strongest source of support. On what should be one of the happiest days ever, the day her granddaughter is born, Minoo is faced with a terrible choice: make a clean break from her constant companion, a sock puppet named Ecology Paul, or lose her daughter and granddaughter, and maybe all of the people she loves. On an emotional drive home from the hospital, Ecology Paul shares the story of how Minoo got to this point, recalling Minoo’s early teenage pregnancy in Iran, her exile to Canada, her questions about her sexuality, and how a ragtag sock puppet came to her when she desperately needed to be seen.  Full of imagination, whimsy and heart, The Unravelling of Ou follows Minoo’s struggles to justify the puppet’s existence and eventually, untangle herself from her dependence on it and reconnect with the people she loves. Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre Iranian-Canadian writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024 and was longlisted for the Toronto Book Award. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, was released with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a host on The New Books Network, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. 💕 @hollayghadery @palimpsestpressbooks #mothersday #iraniancanada #ireadcanadian #bookstagram #booksbooksbooks

Happy Mother’s Day, Ma—and happy day to all who mother! @ggeakins ♥️ . . . #mothersday #momming #mothering #eshgh #madar

In this NBN episode, I speak with award-winning poet Stephanie Bolster about her new book, Long Exposure (Palimpsest Press, 2025). To listen to the conversation, click my bio link and go to my NBN host page. After Hurricane Katrina, the photographer Robert Polidori flew to New Orleans to document the devastation. In the wreckage he witnessed, and in her questions about what she saw in what he saw, Stephanie Bolster found the beginnings of a long poem. Those questions led to unexpected places; meanwhile, life kept pouring in. The ensuing book, Long Exposure, is Bolster’s fifth, a roaming, associative exploration of disasters and their ongoing aftermaths, sufferings large and small, and the vulnerability and value of our own lives. Incremental, unsettling, Long Exposure rushes to and through. Stephanie Bolster has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth, appeared with Brick Books in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award. Her first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems (Véhicule Press, 1998) won the Governor General’s and the Gerald Lampert Awards, and her second, Two Bowls of Milk (McClelland & Stewart, 1999), won the Archibald Lampman Award and was a finalist for the Trillium Award. Her work has been translated into French (Pierre Blanche: poèmes d’Alice, Les Éditions du Noroît, 2007), Spanish, German, and Serbo-Croatian. She edited The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 (Tightrope), the inaugural volume in that ongoing series; and co-edited Penned: Zoo Poems (Signal/Véhicule, 2009). Born in Vancouver, she grew up in Burnaby, BC, now lives in Pointe-Claire, Québec on the Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) territory of Skaniatará:ti, and has taught creative writing at Concordia University in Montréal since 2000. 🫶🏼: @stephaniebolster0110 @palimpsestpressbooks @newbooksnetwork . . . #poetry #poets #hurricanekatrina #robertpolidori #neworleans