Writers' Trust of Canada

Another Canadian city, another enlightening conversation with Canadian authors 🍁 Thank you to everyone who attended our Calgary Conversations in Trust event, featuring authors Marcello Di Cintio (@marcello.di.cintio ), Jenny Heijun Wills (@jennyheijunwills ), and Guy Vanderhaeghe, alongside moderator Shelley Youngblut (@youngblutshelley ). Presented with the support of PwC, @wordfest , @owlsnestbooks , and The Globe and Mail. Join us in Winnipeg on May 12, as three beloved Canadian authors share how they make sense of the world. Visit the link in our bio to get your ticket! #WT50

2026 WT Rising Star Siavash Saadlou “I had the rare privilege of reading Siavash Saadlou’s work, particularly his short fiction. His realism, intricately layered, has the authenticity of lived experience rendered with the acuity of an historian and the virtuosic skill of a born storyteller. The characters who inhabit his pages embody the many-faceted narratives of exile and war, while illuminating the delicate and dissonant condition of living between a foreign modernity and an oppressive theocracy. These stories capture a liminal existence with remarkable precision — its sadness and solitude, its modes of survival and defiance, and its quietly comic dimensions.” — 2026 #WTRisingStars selector #RawiHage

2026 WT Rising Star Vinh Nguyen @cousinvinnhy “Vinh Nguyen’s writing is magical even when it’s heartbreaking, with exquisite storytelling that lingers long past the last word. His masterful ability to blend gladness with grief, keenly observe people, places and history, and bend genres by poetically incorporating elements of fiction into memoir, make him a treasure to read. At this disturbingly fraught and perilous time in the world, Nguyen’s work exploring displacement, concepts of home and family, and the personal and societal devastation wrought by war and conquest offers both a cautionary tale of profound loss and a hopeful testimony to resilience.” — 2026 #WTRisingStars selector Sarah Cox @sarahcox_bc

2026 WT Rising Star Cassandra Myers @cass.myers.poetry “Cassandra Myers offers us literature as strategy. If we uphold the idea that change and liberation requires a diversity of tactics, then we can look to Myers’ diverse and capacious modes of inquiry — what the author themself calls a “kaleidoscopic approach.” Lyric and collage essays, free verse and formal poetry, speculative memoir, divine mathematics and patterns, South Asian diasporic narratives, trauma-informed spoken word, queer and disability theory, and other craft experiments band together to create their changemaking and growing body-of-work. I began my own writing and publishing career during an era of significant “othering” — when writers with under-represented identities or modes of cultural production were urged to edit our work to be more digestible for the so-called average book buyer. I was drawn to Myers’ work for its ability to defy digestibility and instead advance nuance and vital complexity. I look forward to witnessing the evolution of their writing and the impact they will surely continue to have in the larger literary sphere.” — 2026 #WTRisingStars selector Amber Dawn @amberdawn_mononym

2026 WT Rising Star Curtis John McRae @c_crae “Curtis John McRae’s writing got my attention for being subtle, funny, wise, confident, blocked with unpredictable dialogue, laced through with reflections on prior events, and the feeling constantly that something is about to change. He has a facility with making minor characters believe they are the center of the story, which contributes to the all-around socially generous climate he conveys while having, at the core of the plot, a solitary examination of contemporary Canadian life. I knew very little about this world and these people that populate McRae’s fiction, and yet he makes me believe in them and care about that world and care, too, about the person telling these stories.” — 2026 #WTRisingStars selector Michael Winter @michaelwinternet

2026 WT Rising Star Aaron Chan @aaronchanvan “In his memoir, This City Is a Minefield, Aaron Chan writes with a fierce candour about navigating the layered complexities of coming out and negotiating Vancouver’s Cantonese and gay communities, from the negative views of homosexuality in the Asian community, to the hierarchal power structures in the gay community with whiteness on top. It is the honest and courage prose inherent in Chan’s writing that excites me for his future. He is giving voice to so many who fall between margins, who fit and don’t fit, and who must forge, through trial and error, their own personal path.” — 2026 #WTRisingStars selector Paul Seesequasis @pseesequasis

Announcing the 2026 #WTRisingStars! Congratulations to: ◤ Aaron Chan @aaronchanvan , selected by Paul Seesequasis @pseesequasis ◥ Curtis John McRae @c_crae , selected by Michael Winter @michaelwinternet ◣ Cassandra Myers @cass.myers.poetry , selected by Amber Dawn @amberdawn_mononym ◢ Vinh Nguyen@cousinvinnhy , selected by Sarah Cox @sarahcox_bc ◤ Siavash Saadlou, selected by #RawiHage The Writers’ Trust Rising Stars program is a dynamic career development initiative that invites five established authors to each select, endorse, and mentor one writer in the early stages of their career. In addition to the mentorship opportunity, each WT Rising Star receives $5,000 and a two-week, self-directed residency at @gibraltarpointto on the Toronto Islands. The program is generously supported by presenting sponsor @bmocanada and program benefactors Clair Duff in memory of Catherine Shepard, Deb MacLeod and Ward Sellers, John Terry and Lisa Rochon. BMO’s contribution is part of an ongoing relationship and a multiyear funding commitment of $228,000 to Writers’ Trust over four years to support the WT Rising Stars program. Learn more at link in bio. #WT50

Writers’ Trust of Canada free national author event in Winnipeg on May 21! In celebration of our 50th anniversary, WT is hosting authors Zilla Jones @zilla.jones , Tanya Talaga @tanyatalaga_author , and katherena vermette for Conversations in Trust. Join us, @wpgthinair , and @mcnallyrobinson for the Winnipeg stop of our national event series taking place on Thursday, May 21 at Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq @wag_ca . Register for your FREE ticket at www.bit.ly/WT50-Winnipeg or at link in bio. #WT50

Congratulations once more to all finalists for the 2026 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and its winner, Maggie Helwig. ◤ On Oil by #DonGillmor (@biblioasis_books ) ◣ Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community by Maggie Helwig @maggiehelwig7 (@coachhousebooks ) ◢ On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent by #BrianStewart (@simonschusterca ) ◥ On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy by #IraWells (@biblioasis_books ) ◣ Women Who Woke up the Law: Inside the Cases that Changed Women’s Rights in Canada by #KarinWells (@_secondstory ) See this year's finalists discuss their books in a series of tribute videos dedicated to their work. Thank you to our video partner @rogers for making this project possible. bit.ly/4ndguUI The $40,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize is awarded annually for a book that captures a political subject of relevance to Canadian readers and has the potential to shape or influence thinking on Canadian political life. Now in its 26th year, the prize is sponsored by @cnrailway , whose support WT is grateful for, and presented at the Politics & the Pen gala.

"The God of the economy is a human creation, and human lives are what really matter. You do have power and you do have choices about how you use that power. Government does not exist to turn a profit, but to meet human need." Reverend Canon Maggie Helwig's powerful acceptance speech of the 2026 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. Listen to the speech in full at writerstrust.com/ShaughnessyCohen

Politics and the Pen was back last night at @fairmontlaurier , raising $460K for @writerstrust and it work it does to support and celebrate Canadian writers. #canlit #cdnpol #ottevents See carolineinthecapital.ca

Congratulations to Maggie Helwig, winner of the 2026 #ShaughnessyCohen Prize for Political Writing!🏆Helwig has won the prize for her book Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community. ◢ ◣ ◢ “A necessary, on-the-ground view of Canada’s homelessness crisis, Encampment succeeds where much of political handwringing and wishful thinking around housing and poverty consistently fail. Maggie Helwig never lets compassion impede lucidity, and her book avoids both cynicism and battle fatigue. The result: a clear-eyed call to not look away, but to deepen understanding of the issue. As more and more of our neighbours find themselves living unsheltered, this book is essential reading.”—2026 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize jury (Norma Dunning, Chantal Hébert, and Paul Wells @inklesspw ) ◣◥ ◥ The Shaughnessy Cohen Prize, sponsored by @cnrailway , was awarded to Helwig at Politics & the Pen, an annual fundraiser in Ottawa organized by a third-party committee to benefit Writers’ Trust. A total of $460,000 was raised at the event in direct support of Canadian authors. Learn more about this year’s winner at link in bio 🔗 @coachhousebooks