The best Canadian fiction of 2024

Here are the CBC Books picks for the top Canadian fiction of the year!

In What I Know About You, Tarek is on the right path: he’ll be a doctor like his father, marry and have children. But when he falls for his patient’s son, Ali, his life is turned upside-down as he realizes his sexuality against a backdrop of political turmoil in 1960s Cairo. In the 2000s, Tarek is now a doctor in Montreal. When someone begins to write to him and about him, the past that he’s been trying to forget comes back to haunt him. 

What I Know About You was on the shortlists for the 2024 Giller Prize and the 2024 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

Chacour is a Montreal-based writer who was born to Egyptian parents and grew up between France and Quebec. In addition to writing, he works in the financial sector. What I Know About You is his first book and was a bestseller in its French edition, winning many awards including the Prix Femina. 

Strauss has translated 12 works of fiction, several graphic novels and one screenplay. He was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for translation for The Country Will Bring Us No Peace, Synapses and The Longest Year. His translation of Le plongeur by Stephane Larue called The Dishwasher won the 2020 Amazon First Novel Award. He lives in Quebec City. 

The Other Valley follows the story of Odile Ozanne, who lives in a town with a magical valley. To the East, the town exists twenty years forward in time. To the West, it’s 20 years behind. Odile seeks to join the Conseil, who decides which of the town’s residents may cross the border into the valley to see departed loved ones. When she recognizes two mourners by accident, Odile realizes they have travelled from the future to see someone Odile knows in her present — setting off a chain of events that change the course of several lives. 

The Other Valley is Scott Alexander Howard’s first novel. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. He currently lives in Vancouver.

Weaving in historical figures and events, the mysterious generations-spanning novel Held begins on a First World War battlefield near the River Aisne in 1917, where John lies in the falling snow unable to move or feel his legs. The past proves harder to escape than he once thought and John is haunted by ghosts that begin to surface in his photos with messages he struggles to decipher.

Held won the 2024 Giller Prize and was a finalist for the 2024 Booker Prize. 

Based in Toronto, Anne Michaels is a poet and author who has previously won major literary awards including the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Before taking home this year’s prize, she was shortlisted for the Giller Prize twice: in 1996 for Fugitive Pieces and in 2009 for The Winter Vault. 

Kit McNair was born Kathleen to an Irish farming family in Ontario and, a tomboy in boy’s clothes, doesn’t fit in with the expectations of a farmgirl set out for them. When Rebekah, a German-Canadian’s doctor’s daughter comes to town, she, Kit and Kit’s older brother Landon find themselves in a love triangle which tears their families apart.

Loghan Paylor is an Ontario-born author currently based in Abbotsford, B.C. Their debut novel, The Cure for Drowning, is a historical work that centres queer and non-binary characters and was longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize.

In Prairie Edge, Isidore (Ezzy) Desjarlais and Grey Ginther live together in Grey’s uncle’s trailer, passing their time with cribbage and cheap beer. Grey is cynical of what she feels is a lazy and performative activist culture, while Grey is simply devoted to his distant cousin. So when Grey concocts a scheme to set a herd of bison loose in downtown Edmonton, Ezzy is along for the ride — one that has devastating, fatal consequences.

Prairie Edge was shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize.

Kerr is a Métis/Ukrainian writer who hails from many prairie towns and cities, including Saskatoon. He now lives in Edmonton. A 2022 CBC Books writer to watch, his previous works include the poetry collection Old Gods and the novel Avenue of Champions, which was longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize, was a finalist for the 2022 Amazon Canada First Novel Award and won the ReLit award the same year. Kerr currently teaches creative writing at the University of Alberta.

A Great Country is a novel which follows the Shah family as they struggle to move up the social ladder in America and belong to the gated community of Pacific Hills. Ashok and Priya have lived in the U.S. for the past twenty years and are beginning to feel a great separation from the values of their adolescent children.

When their preteen son is arrested, the repercussions seep into each family member and the greater community as they come to realize the systems of prejudice still at work around them.

Shilpi Somaya Gowda is a Toronto-born writer currently based in California. Her other novels include Secret Daughter and The Golden Son.

Peggy tells the story of Peggy Guggenheim and her rise to making her name synonymous with art and genius. From her early beginnings in New York as the daughter of two Jewish dynasties to her adventures in the European art worlds, she is forced to balance her loyalty to her family and her desire to break free from conventions and live her own original life.

Rebecca Godfrey was an author and journalist known for her books The Torn Skirt, which was a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the true crime story Under the Bridge, which was adapted to screen. She grew up in Canada but lived in upstate New York. Peggy is her final novel, completed by Leslie Jamison after she died. 

Jamison is the Brooklyn-based author of The Empathy Exams, The Recovering, the novel The Gin Closet and the memoir Splinters.

Behind You follows the story of Alma, a film editor for a corny true crime series. At a glance, her life with her wife and teenage son seems comfortable and safe. But when Infamous’ latest episode features the Scarborough Stalker — who terrorized Alma’s own neighborhood when she was a girl — Alma is consumed by her long-suppressed past.

In the present day, she must reckon with her understanding of consent to stop her young son from making terrible choices toward his own girlfriend. Unfolding in two timelines, Behind You challenges and dissects rape culture and champions one girl’s resilience into adulthood. 

Hernandez is a Canadian writer, author and playwright. Her 2017 novel, Scarborough, was a shortlisted finalist for the 2017 Toronto Book Award, the 2018 Trillium Book Award, the 2018 Edmund White Award and was on Canada Reads 2022 defended by actress Malia Baker. 

Scarborough was also adapted to screen as a feature film and premiered at TIFF in 2021. Her other books include The Story of Us, Crosshairs and the children’s books I Promise, M is for Mustache and Where Do Your Feelings Live?.

Following two Michif sisters, lyn and June, real ones examines what happens when their estranged and white mother gets called out as a pretendian. Going by the name Raven Bearclaw, she’s seen success for her art that draws on Indigenous style. As the media hones in on the story, the sisters, whose childhood trauma manifests in different ways, are pulled into their mother’s web of lies and the painful past resurfaces. real ones was longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize.

vermette is a Métis writer from Winnipeg. Her books include the poetry collections North End Love Songs and river woman and the four-book graphic novel series A Girl Called Echo. North End Love Songs won the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. Her novels are The Break, The Strangers, The Circle. The Break was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. It was defended by Candy Palmater on Canada Reads 2017. The Strangers won the 2021 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Complex Indigenous lives intersect in the stories that make up Coexistence. Stretching across Canadian prairies and the West Coast, we travel to reserves, university campuses and lodgings of old residential schools to meet characters learning to live with and love one another and accept the realities of the past, present and future happening together all at once. 

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer from Driftpile Cree Nation in Alberta. His first novel was A Minor Chorus. This Wound is a World, Belcourt’s debut collection of poetry, won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize. The collection also won the 2018 Indigenous Voices Award for most significant work of poetry in English and was a finalist for the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry.

In Songs for the Brokenhearted, Zohara is a 30-something Yemeni Israeli woman living in New York City, a life that feels much simpler than her childhood growing up in Israel. When her sister calls to let her know of their mother’s death, she gets on a plane with no return ticket and begins the journey of unravelling lost family stories.

Ayelet Tsabari is the author of The Art of Leaving, which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Memoir and was a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Hilary Weston Prize, and The Best Place on Earth, which won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. Her short story Green was shortlisted for the 2018 CBC Short Story Prize. She teaches in the MFA creative writing program at the University of Guelph, the MFA in Fiction program at the University of King’s College and the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University. She lived in Toronto for a number of years and currently resides in Tel Aviv. 

The Code Noir, or the Black Code, was a set of 59 articles decreed by Louis XVI in 1685 which regulated ownership of slaves in all French colonies. In her debut fiction work, Canisia Lubrin reflects on these codes to examine the legacy of enslavement and colonization — and the inherent power of Black resistance.

Lubrin is a Canadian writer, editor and academic who was born in St. Lucia and currently based in Whitby, Ont. Her debut poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis was longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the Pat Lowther Award and was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award. Her poetry collection The Dyzgraphxst won the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. It also won the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Prize for poetry.

In Jean Marc Ah-Sen’s novel Kilworthy Tanner, Jonno is a young writer looking to make waves in the literary world. 

When he meets legendary author Kilworthy Tanner at a party, he’s shocked when she takes an interest in him — and the two fall into a complicated relationship that blurs the lines between mentorship and an affair. 

Ah-Sen is a Toronto-based writer of Mauritian descent. His books include Grand Menteur and In the Beggarly Style of Imitation and his writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Catapult, The Comics Journal, Maclean’s, Hazlitt, the Globe & Mail, The Walrus and The Toronto Star.

In Batshit Seven, Glen “Glue” Wu has a general apathy toward his return to Hong Kong from Toronto. As a lacklustre, weed smoking, hungover ESL teacher, Glue watches passively as Hong Kong falls into conflict around him. He cares only for his sister, who is trying to marry rich, and for both an on-and-off-again relationship and the memory of a Canadian connection now lost. Government control hardens, thrusting Glue into a journey that ultimately ends in violence. 

Batshit Seven won the 2024 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction prize.

Sheung-King’s first novel, You Are Eating an Orange. You are Naked., was a finalist for multiple awards, including the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. It was also longlisted for Canada Reads 2021. Sheung-King splits his time between Canada and China. 

A Way to Be Happy is a short story collection that follows various characters as they try to find happiness. Ranging from mundane to extraordinary, the stories feature everything from a pair of addicts robbing parties to fund their sobriety to a Russian hitman dealing with an illness and reliving his past. 

Caroline Adderson is the Vancouver-based author of five novels, including The Sky is Falling, Ellen in Pieces and A Russian Sister. She has also published two short story collections, including the 1993 Governor General’s Literary Award finalist Bad Imaginings. 

Adderson’s awards include three B.C. Book Prizes, a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Fiction. She has received the 2006 Marian Engel Award for mid-career achievement. She is also a three-time winner of the CBC Literary Prizes, and A Way to Be Happy was longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize.

Death by a Thousand Cuts traces the funny, honest and difficult parts of womanhood. From a writer whose ex published a book about their breakup to the confession wrought by a Reddit post, these stories probe rage, loneliness, bodily autonomy and these women’s relationships with themselves just as much as those around them.

Shashi Bhat’s previous novels include The Family Took Shape, a finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and The Most Precious Substance on Earth, which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction in 2022. Her short stories won the Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her novel Death by a Thousand Cuts was longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize. Bhat lives in New Westminster, B.C. 

When after seven years, Regina’s brother shows up on her doorstep with his six-year-old daughter, her quiet loner life is never the same. The longer they stay, the clearer it becomes to Regina that something terrible has happened — and once the secret is revealed, they’re sent on a fraught journey from Alberta to the coast of B.C. Bad Land was longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize.

Originally from Calgary, Corinna Chong lives in Kelowna, B.C. and teaches English and fine arts at Okanagan College. She published her first novel, Belinda’s Rings, in 2013. In 2023, she published the short story collection The Whole Animal which includes Kids in Kindergarten, the winner of the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize.

Curiosities is a novel that centres around an amateur historian who discovers an obscure memoir from 1600s England that explores a love that could not be explained in those times. Weaving together different fictional accounts, the novel tells the life stories of Joan and Thomasina, the only two survivors of a village ravaged by the plague, and how they eventually find each other again — Thomasina, now Tom, navigating the world in boy’s clothes and as a male — and the struggles they face when they’re discovered, naked, by a member of the clergy.

Curiosities was shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize.

Anne Fleming is an author based in Victoria. Her books include Pool-Hopping and Other Stories, which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and her middle-grade novel, The Goat, which was a Junior Library Guild and White Ravens selection.

The collection of stories in Peacocks of Instagram provide a tapestry of the Indian diaspora. Tales of revenge, love, desire and family explore the intense ramifications of privilege, or lack thereof. Coffee shop and hotel housekeeping employees, engineers and children show us all of themselves, flaws and all.

Peacocks of Instagram was shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize.

Rajagopalan was the 2021 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award winner. Born to Indian parents in Saudi Arabia, she has lived across India, the United States and Canada. Her previous writing has appeared in publications such as the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, the New Quarterly, Room and Arc. Rajagopalan now lives and works in Toronto.

In Winter I Get Up at Night tells the story of music teacher Emer McConnell who lives in rural Saskatchewan. One day, as she heads to work in the early morning, she takes a trip down memory lane, taking us on her life’s journey, from the prairie storm that left her in a children’s ward when she was 11 to family secrets and distant love affairs. 

Jane Urquhart is a novelist and poet. In 2005, she was made an officer of the Order of Canada. Urquhart has written seven critically acclaimed novels. In 1994, she received the Marian Engel Award, now known as Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award. Her debut, The Whirlpool, received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France. The 1993 speculative fiction novel Away won the Trillium Award, was a finalist for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and a contender on Canada Reads 2013, when it was defended by Charlotte Gray. 

The novel Naniki, or active spirits, allow shape-shifting sea beings Amana and Skelele to travel the Caribbean towards a strange, dreamed future. Devastation sends the pair back through time in this historical, magical realist novel in order to save their islands, seas and each other. 

Oonya Kempadoo is a Grenadian English Guyanese author who lives in Montreal.

Blackheart Man is a fantasy novel about the magical island of Chynchin. It follows Veycosi who is training as a griot (historian and musician) and is hoping to score a spot on Chynchin’s Colloquium of scholars. When children start disappearing and tar statues come to life, it’s clear that sinister forces are at play — the demon called the Blackheart Man is causing trouble.

Nalo Hopkinson is the author of many novels and short stories, including Brown Girl in the Ring, which won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest and was defended on Canada Reads in 2008 by Jemeni. Her other books include Sister Mine, Midnight Robber, The Chaos, The New Moon’s Arms and Skin Folk. In 2021, she won the Damon Knight Grand Master award, a lifetime achievement award for science fiction.

In Hi, It’s Me, Fawn returns to her mother’s farmhouse after her death — one that is also inhabited by four other women with interesting and strange beliefs. As she lives in her mother’s room and tries to figure out what to do with her possessions, she becomes obsessed with archiving her mother’s writing and documents, teaching her more and more about the woman she thought she knew so well. 

Fawn Parker is an author and current PhD student at the University of New Brunswick. Her novel What We Both Know was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2022. Her poetry collection Soft Inheritance won the Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize.

We Speak Through the Mountain is a sequel novella to the post-apocalyptic Albertan book The Annual Migration of Clouds. Reid Graham is 19 years old and fighting against both the climate crisis-affected Rocky Mountains and her own chronic illness to make her way to Howse University, a supposed safe haven.

When she arrives, she finds it more and more difficult to forge connections and leave behind the guilt she has of leaving her community. When she is sent word from home, Reid is faced with an impossible decision and a crumbling reality.

Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction writer based in Edmonton. Her series Beneath the Rising received nominations for the Crawford Award, British Fantasy Awards, Locus Awards and Aurora Awards.

Her book The Annual Migration of Clouds won the 2022 Aurora Award for best novella. Her other books include The Butcher of the Forest and No One Will Come Back for Us.

In the novel Broughtupsy, the death of her brother brings Akúa home to Jamaica after a decade. There, she struggles to reconnect with her estranged sister while they spread his ashes and revisit landmarks of their shared childhood. A chance meeting with a stripper named Jayda forces Akúa to reckon with her queerness, her homeland, her family and herself over two life-changing weeks.

Christina Cooke is a Jamaican Canadian writer based in New York City. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Caribbean Writer, Prairie Schooner and Epiphany: A Literary Journal. She has won the Writers’ Trust M&S Journey Prize and Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. Broughtupsy is her debut novel.

Each with their own struggles that landed them in the psych ward, Dee, Misa and Matt became inseparable friends in Never Been Better. When Misa and Matt are set to be married at a destination wedding a year after being discharged, Dee arrives with her own form of baggage. She’s in love with Matt, and unlike everyone else attending the wedding, Dee knows how Misa and Matt met. Telling him would jeopardize not only their friendships but mutual support systems — Dee will have to decide what matters most.

Leanne Toshiko Simpson lives with bipolar disorder while teaching at the University of Toronto. She was Scarborough’s Emerging Writer in 2016 and was nominated for the Journey Prize in 2019. Never Been Better is her first novel.

The Capital of Dreams is a dark fairytale set in a small European country during a period of war. Fourteen-year-old Sofia is the daughter of the revered writer, Clara Bottom. When their country is invaded, Clara bundles Sofia onto the last train evacuating children out of the city. Clara gives her daughter her latest manuscript to smuggle to safety.

When the children’s train stops in the middle of the forest, Sofia senses they are in danger. She manages to escape, but loses her mother’s beloved manuscript. Soon Sofia finds herself alone in a country at war on an epic journey to find all that she has lost.

Heather O’Neill is a novelist, short story writer and essayist from Montreal. She won Canada Reads 2024 championing The Future by Catherine Leroux, which was translated from French by Susan Ouriou. O’Neill is the first person to win Canada Reads as both an author and a panellist. Her debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals won Canada Reads 2007 when it was defended by musician John K. Samson. Her other books include Scotiabank Giller Prize finalists The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and her short story collection Daydreams of Angels.

Vacationing one summer on Prince Edward Island, Lucy meets Felix in an electric, chemistry-filled night. Only one problem: Felix is her best friend Bridget’s younger brother. On her annual return trips to P.E.I., Lucy vows that This Summer Will Be Different and she will avoid Felix and his bed, but that’s easier said than done. When Bridget rushes home to P.E.I. in crisis a week before her wedding, Lucy can only follow and remind herself to protect her heart, but finally wonders if she really wants to do that after all. 

Carley Fortune is a Toronto-based journalist who has worked as an editor for Refinery29, The Globe and Mail, Chatelaine and Toronto Life. Her second book, Meet Me at the Lake was a contender for Canada Reads 2024, when it was championed by Mirian Njoh.

Parade is a novel that tells the story of the artist G which ignores the limits of identity, character and plot. G is both a 22-year-old painter who explores a different country and a middle-aged man who starts to paint upside down in this mind- bending novel. 

Rachel Cusk is a Canadian-born novelist who lives in the U.K. She is best known for her Outline trilogy, which includes the novels Outline, Transit and Kudos. Both Outline and Transit were shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, in 2015 and 2017, respectively. Her novel Second Place was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021.

Childhood friends Gertie and Sisi are extremely close, despite the socioeconomic differences that separate their daily lives in 1940s Port-au-Prince. An end-of-life secret tears their families apart in Village Weavers, and we follow the girls across the decades as Sisi moves to Paris and Gertie marries into a rich Dominican family — eventually both landing in the United States. A sudden phone call forces their lives back together, where they might finally be able to forgive and trust again.

Myriam J. A. Chancy is the author of four novels and four books of literary criticism. Her novel The Loneliness of Angels won the Guyana Prize for Literature Caribbean Award in 2011 and was shortlisted for the 2011 OCM Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature for fiction. Chancy was raised in Haiti and Canada and now resides in the United States. Her previous book, What Storm, What Thunder, was longlisted for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

The sequel to Red Team Blues continues the adventures of forensic accountant Martin Hench in The Bezzle as he navigates the long guerilla war between those who want to hide and find money. During a vacation on Catalina Island, Martin accidentally disrupts an on-going scheme and finds himself caught between the ultra-wealthy and California’s Department of Corrections, with hundreds of thousands of prisoners caught in the middle. 

Cory Doctorow is a Toronto-born author, activist and journalist living in Los Angeles. His work, spanning non-fiction and fiction, adult, YA and childhood audiences, has seen him inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and earned him the Sir Arthur Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Award for lifetime achievement. His book Radicalized was a Canada Reads 2020 contender, when it was defended by Akil Augustine.

In the 19th instalment of the Armand Gamache series, The Grey Wolf follows Chief Inspector Gamache and his allies as they pursue a deadly threat from Three Pines, Quebec, across the province and beyond. What starts as one murder evolves into a desperate mission to track a creature that has the potential to devastate cities and towns including Three Pines. Dealing with betrayal, suspicion and loyalty, Gamache must rely on his instincts to unravel the mystery before it’s too late. 

Louise Penny is a former CBC broadcaster and journalist. She is now the author of the Inspector Armand Gamache mystery series and recipient of the 2020 Agatha Award for best contemporary novel for the 16th installment in the series, All the Devils are Here. She collaborated with former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton to write the political thriller State of Terror. Penny was named to the Order of Canada in 2013.

The Pages of the Sea tells the story of Wheeler and her older sisters on a Caribbean island after their mother moves to England to find work. As she waits for her mother to send for her, Wheeler feels alone and must navigate the tensions between her aunts who took her and her sisters in. 

Anne Hawk is a writer who grew up in the Caribbean, the U.K. and Canada. The Pages of the Sea is her first novel. She previously worked as a journalist, paralegal and school teacher. She is currently based in London, England.

In May Our Joy Endure, Céline is a celebrated architect and icon. When her first megaproject in her home of Montreal is met with harsh criticism for bringing on gentrification, she is fired as CEO from her firm. She must try to understand what exactly she is being accused of and figure out what to tell herself so that she can continue to justify her world of privilege. 

Kevin Lambert is a Montreal-based author who grew up in Chicoutimi, Que. May Our Joy Endure won the Prix Médicis, Prix Décembre and Prix Ringuet. His novel Querelle de Roberval was a finalist for numerous prizes in Quebec, Canada and France. His first novel, You Will Love What You Have Killed, won a prize for the best novel from the Saguenay region.

Donald Winkler is a Montreal-based translator. He has won three Governor General’s Literary Awards for French-to-English translation.

This Strange Eventful History follows a French Algerian family over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010. The book tells the story of the Cassars as they are separated in the Second World War, flee Algeria after it declares independence and try to build their lives elsewhere, with the social and political upheaval of their recent past fresh in their minds. As she grows up and wants to understand her family’s history, Chloe, the youngest member of the family, convinces her parents and grandparents that sharing this part of them will bring them peace. 

This Strange Eventful History was longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and the 2024 Giller Prize.

Messud is a Canadian American author with French Algerian roots. Her books include The Emperor’s Children, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006, When the World Was Steady and The Hunters, which were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She has won Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Cambridge, Mass.

Interesting Facts About Space tells the story of Enid, a space-obsessed serial-dating lesbian. With a penchant for true crime podcasts, she can easily handle the vastness of space and gruesome murder details. But she’s got one major phobia: bald men. And while she desperately tries to keep it under control, she can’t shake the feeling that someone is following her.

Emily Austin is a writer based in Ottawa who studied English literature and library science at Western University. She is also the author of the novel Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead and the poetry collection Gay Girl Prayers. 

The novel Dayspring is a genre-bending reimagining of biblical tales that weaves together stories of passion, grief and destruction that echo through time. The work plays with themes of sexuality and its narrative examines contemporary queer culture’s relationship with faith and religion. Dayspring won the 2024 Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize.

Anthony Oliveira is an author, pop culture critic, podcaster and PhD. He lives in Toronto and has won multiple National Magazine Awards and GLAAD Media Awards.

Struggling with trauma from her teenage years, Louise lives a life of punk violence until she gets a job at a men’s hair salon in the novel Hair for Men. There, she builds relationships with her clients and begins to feel more settled. But when that sense of calm is destroyed, she runs away to the East Coast to escape her past, which she does successfully until a man from the Bay of Fundy arrives and gives her the opportunity to right her wrongs. 

Michelle Winters is a writer, painter and translator from Saint John currently living in Toronto. Her novel debut novel, I Am a Truck, was shortlisted for the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize. She also translated Kiss the Undertow and Daniil and Vanya by Marie-Hélène Larochelle.

In Monster, a work of autofiction, Yoveeta is a woman struggling with her quiet rage, which she calls “Monster” that festers deep inside. Her fury started when she left her home country and dealt with sexual and romantic trauma and begins to resurface on the night she’s about to launch her memoir when she meets an interesting man. 

Jowita Bydlowska is a writer and journalist based in Toronto. A professor at the Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University, she’s known for her memoir Drunk Mom and novels Guy and Possessed. Bydlowska has written columns on popular culture and mental health for the National Post, the Globe and Mail and CBC.

The short story collection Bad Houses features narratives that are dark, witty and with elements of horror and the absurd. Its stories include a doctor who discovers a double-edged cure for the Ebola virus, a college student who loses a different body part each time they return home for the summer, a hairdresser striving to keep his client’s secrets and a young girl who develops a fascination with the trolls that harvest her father’s pumpkin patch. 

John Elizabeth Stintzi is a writer from northwestern Ontario, currently based in Kansas City, Mo. Their work Selections From Junebat won the 2019 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and the Malahat Review’s 2019 Long Poem Prize. The complete poetry collection, Junebat, was published in 2020. They are also the author of the novel Vanishing Monuments, which was a finalist for the 2021 Amazon Canada First Novel Award.