Kathryn Mockler

Very grateful to receive this award. Honored to be in the company of these wonderful finalists: Ali Blythe, Tim Lilburn, Arleen Paré, and shō yamagushiku. Thanks to the judges—Susan Braley, Susan Sanford Blades, and Iain Higgins; the Victoria Buttler Book Prize; the City of Victoria, and Kathryn Marlow who hosted this event! Thanks to @bookhugpress , my editor Malcolm Sutton, my husband David Poolman, and all my family and friends. I will be donating the $5000 prize money to three organizations. Below are some words I shared at the event. — I’m humbled to be in the company of these finalists and their beautiful books. No matter how solitary the act of writing can feel, a writer is always addressing a collective, shared world - describing, analyzing, critiquing, redefining, and expanding it. For me, writing is inherently political. Writers cannot ignore the world that shapes their words nor the world that receives them. In Anecdotes, I use personal experiences to grapple with violence, oppression, and the climate crisis, and I am accepting this award at a time in which a genocide is being perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians with the support of the US, Canada, and many European states—the same colonial forces responsible for the genocide of Indigenous Peoples across Turtle Island. While Canada makes me complicit in these crimes through its arms sales and moral failure, I am deeply grateful to the judges and the Victoria Butler Book Prize for enabling me to donate the entirety of this award money to the following: • @raven_trust an Indigenous justice organization that raises legal funds for Indigenous Peoples in Canada to defend rights and the integrity of lands and cultures; • @msfcanada for their work in Palestine, Sudan, the DRC, and over 75 countries; • and Palestine Children’s Relief Fund @thepcrf I encourage anyone appalled by these atrocities to seek out groups like ArmsEmbargoNow and @worldbeyondwarcanada Please visit my linktree in my bio for individual GoFundMe Campaigns to support.

This is amazing!!! I absolutely love every writer who fought for this and chose humanity over their career! Some are still blacklisted. So if you’re ever looking for a writer to invite to your festival or reading series mosey on over to the list of writers who withdrew their books. As we see, silence about genocide has brought us….wait for it….more genocide… and the brink of nuclear annihilation! ID: The Giller Prize is no longer partnered with Indigo Books, the Azrieli Foundation or Scotiabank. Thanks to Writers Against the War on Gaza, No Arms in the Arts, and CanLit Responds! @wawog_now #NoArmsInTheArts #CanLitResponds And thanks to everyone who publicly opposed the live-streamed genocide that continues and that we are still supporting with CPP, our taxes, arm sale loop holes, etc. 🍉 Please note that my support for this win is not support for the Giller prize in anyway. I will never support the Giller as it is a prize with no integrity, but I’m very very happy for this win for all that it symbolizes.

CIGARETTES CAUSE IMPOTENCE Health Canada

The literary scam emails are getting a little threatening. Hi I sent you a message last week and you read it. I know because I could see it. You did not reply and that is completely fine. Most people do not reply to the first message. But here is the thing about me. I only reach out to writers whose work genuinely stops me. I do not send the same message to two hundred authors and hope someone bites. That is not how I work.

Honoured to present an excerpt from Pizza Before We Die: An Eyewitness Account in Gaza (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2026) by Hassan Kanafani with Yasuko Thanh in Issue 54 of SMLTA. Hassan Kanafani is from Gaza. He is a graduate from the Faculty of Engineering at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. “Three activists, moved by his words, started collecting his [Reddit] posts without a clear plan - only the conviction that his story needed to be seen and the hope that somehow, it might help raise funds for him. By chance, those posts found their way to award-winning author Yasuko Thanh (@yasukonguyenthanh ), who helped Hassan frame them for a book.” —Arsenal Pulp Press Description (@arsenalpulp ) This excerpt will stop you in your tracks. Chapter 1: December 2024 We Won’t Feel the Cold I sit in the modest tent I share with my family, in one of Gaza’s crowded camps in the desert near the beach. The hanging piece of fabric separating me from my nearest neighbours barely conceals the view, let alone sound. Everyone can hear everyone else; there is no privacy at all. Read more on Send My Love to Anyone: /p/pizza-before-we-die-an-eyewitness There you will find a link to purchase this book. A portion of the proceeds will be going to Doctors Without Borders.

On the nose but whatevs.