Martha Baillie, Sheung-King, Madeleine Thien among Writers’ Trust Awards recipients

The Writers’ Trust of Canada presented seven literary prizes and more than $330,000 to Canadian authors at its annual awards on Tuesday. But the richest win of them all, the $75,000 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, was bittersweet.

That award went to Toronto’s Martha Baillie, for There Is No Blue. The book reflects on her mother’s passing, her father’s life and her sister’s suicide. Christina Baillie took her own life shortly before the publication of the siblings’ co-written book, 2019′s Sister Language.

“I did not anticipate I would be standing up here,” said Ms. Baillie, who asked for a Kleenex. “At this moment my greatest desire is to hide. But in this precarious moment that we live in, I think hiding is the last thing we can allow ourselves to indulge in.”

On the fiction side, Sheung-King was awarded the $60,000 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for his novel, Batshit Seven, about a millennial living through protests in Hong Kong. His first novel, You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked, was a finalist for the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.

Sheung-King divides his time between Canada and China. He was among the 37 writers who signed a public letter saying they had asked their publishers not to forward their books for consideration for this year’s Giller Prize, in protest of that award’s lead sponsorship by Scotiabank.

A subsidiary of the bank has a stake in Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer the authors say is responsible for weapons being used against Palestinian civilians during the war in Gaza.

The Giller Prize was awarded Monday to Anne Michaels for her novel, Held. In her acceptance speech, she seemed to allude to a Canadian literary scene fractured by the Gaza war.

“I am standing here tonight in solidarity with Canadian publishers and booksellers,” she said. “We need unity, not just with one community but among all the arts to forge practical alliances.”

On May 7, at the annual Politics and the Pen fundraising gala for the Writers’ Trust at Ottawa’s Fairmont Château Laurier, author-playwright Kagiso Lesego Molope was removed from the event after she took to the stage to deliver an admonishing, impromptu speech on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

The Writers’ Trust ceremony at CBC’s Glenn Gould Studio on Tuesday went off without any disruptions, but there were many overt references to the war in Gaza during acceptance speeches.

Announcing the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize winner, juror Saeed Teebi, his voice shaking, said that 2024 “was, and always will be, the year of genocide,” and that it was also the “year of suppression of both the spoken and written word, making protesting the dead in Palestine or elsewhere or even eulogizing them into an act of bravery that mostly met by silence and deaf ears.”

Seemingly responding to Ms. Michaels’s Giller Prize speech in which she said, “I write because the dead can read,” Mr. Teebi, a Palestinian-Canadian writer, said “the dead can never read our words.”

Anthony Oliveira won the $12,000 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers for the novel, Dayspring, a retelling of biblical tales and a coming-of-age story. Oliveira, a Toronto-based author, film programmer and podcaster, said “free Palestine, ceasefire now.”

The other four awards recognized careers. Montreal-based Madeleine Thien earned the $25,000 Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award. Her breakout 2016 novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was awarded the Giller Prize and the Governor-General’s Literary Award.

Thien said she would donate her prize money to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, the Lebanese Red Cross, and the Writer’s Trust Woodcock Fund, which provides emergency financial support to professional writers in need.

Dene/Métis filmmaker and playwright Marie Clements won the $40,000 Matt Cohen Award, which recognizes a lifetime of work in poetry or prose, in French or English. Her 2000 play, The Unnatural and Accidental Women, based on the real-life case of a Vancouver serial killer who preyed on middle-aged Indigenous women, was the inaugural presentation of the National Arts Centre’s Indigenous Theatre department in Ottawa in 2019.

Calgary-born, Vancouver-based poet Rita Wong won the $60,000 Latner Griffin Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize. Her collection, forage, earned her the 2008 Dorothy Livesay Award, given annually to the best collection of poetry by a resident of British Columbia.

Speaking for Ms. Wong, who was not present, writer Erica Isomura referenced the “unacceptable, grossly funded slaughter of Palestinian people,” to enthusiastic applause from the audience.

The Saskatoon-born children’s writer and novelist Sara O’Leary walked away with the $25,000 Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People. The former literary columnist for The Vancouver Sun and CBC Radio has written a number of books for children, including This is Sadie, which was adapted for the stage by New York City Children’s Theater.

Tuesday’s ceremony was hosted by Canadian playwright and performer Charlie Petch.