The 2025 QWF Literary Awards Finalists

Elizabeth Blanchard’s short fiction has appeared in Canadian literary journals and anthologies. A past winner of the New Brunswick Literary Competition and a 2021 finalist for the David Adams Richards Prize, she co-edited Cadence: voix féminines / female voices (Frog Hollow Press, 2020) with Kayla Geitzler—a multilingual anthology of New Brunswick women poets and translators. She has served on the board of the Frye Festival and as assistant fiction editor for The Antigonish Review. 

Nancy King Schofield, a Fine Arts graduate of Mount Allison University, has exhibited her work in more than one hundred shows and is a founding member of Moncton’s Galerie 12. Her visual art has earned her recognition, including an award from the Festival des arts visuels en Atlantique and a New Brunswick Arts Board grant. A Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick poetry prize winner, she founded the Breach House Gang and Women Who Write, two long-standing collectives of New Brunswick writers and visual artists. 

Cassandra Calin is a cartoonist and humorist best known for her semi-autobiographical webcomic series, Cassandra Comics, in which she talks about her life with curly hair, high expectations, and other daily problems. Originally from Romania, Cassandra immigrated to Canada when she was a child and later earned her BA in graphic design from l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM). The New Girl is her long-form graphic novel debut.

Monique Polak is the author of 36 books for young people and a three-time winner of the Janet Savage Blachford Prize for Children’s and YA Literature (formerly called the QWF Prize for Children’s and YA Literature). Monique taught at Marianopolis College for 35 years. She continues to do writing workshops for young people across Canada. She has also worked for many years with the Blue Metropolis Literary Foundation. Monique’s work has been translated into French, Dutch, Korean, and Armenian. Her middle-grade novel Wanted: Your House will be released in the spring of 2026 by Kids Can Press. 

Valéry Goulet is an award-winning designer and illustrator based in Edmonton, Alberta. Her work spans editorial, publishing, and public awareness campaigns, with a focus on children’s literature. She has illustrated four published books, including Remember This, celebrated for its warmth and visual storytelling. With over 25 years of experience in the design industry, Valéry also teaches design fundamentals and visual communication design as an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Alberta. Her illustrations have received national and international recognition for their creativity and emotional depth.

Edeet Ravel is the author of fourteen books for children and adults. Her books have been translated into seven languages and have won numerous awards. Edeet has been shortlisted for the Giller Prize and was a Governor General’s Award finalist in two categories. Her latest (crossover) novels are A Boy Is Not a Bird and A Boy Is Not a Ghost, about a child who is exiled to Siberia in WWII, and Miss Matty, in which a teenager in Montreal dreams of being a Hollywood star. 

Fred Anderson was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He joined the Civil Rights Movement at age 15 and became field secretary of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. After fleeing to Montreal as a Vietnam war resister in 1966, he lived under an assumed name for 11 years. Awarded the 1973 Board of Governors Medal for Creative Expression in Literary Arts at Sir George Williams University, he was instrumental in co-founding a Black literary forum and two Black research institutes. He worked for many years in rehabilitation centres for teenage girls, including in Northern Quebec with Cree and Inuit youth.

Eric Andrew-Gee is the Quebec correspondent for The Globe and Mail, where he has worked since 2015. He is the winner of two National Newspaper Awards, and his work has been published in The Walrus, Toronto Life, and The New Republic. A Toronto native, he studied history at McGill University and now lives in Montreal with his wife and twin toddlers.

Jessica Bebenek is an interdisciplinary poet, bookmaker, and educator living between Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) and an off-grid shack on unceded Anishinaabe territory. Bebenek’s writing has been nominated for the Journey Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the CBC Poetry Prize. In 2021, she was a finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry. Her recent chapbooks include You Don’t Get Out Much (2024), I REMEMBER THE EXORCISM (Gap Riot Press, 2022), and What is Punk (2019).

Amal Elsana Alh’jooj, PhD, is an Associate Professor at McGill University’s School of Social Work and the Founding Executive Director of the nonprofit organization Promoting Leadership for Empowerment, Development, and Justice (PLEDJ). For over three decades, she has advanced feminist, Indigenous, and community-driven organizing in the Middle East and Canada, bridging academia and grassroots activism. Amal has received numerous honours, including the King Charles III Coronation Medal, Genius 100 Visionaries of the Future, the New Israel Fund’s Human Rights Award, and the Victor J. Goldberg Prize for Peace in the Middle East. In 2005, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as part of the 1000 PeaceWomen initiative.

Jessica Bebenek is an interdisciplinary poet, bookmaker, and educator living between Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) and an off-grid shack on unceded Anishinaabe territory. Bebenek’s writing has been nominated for the Journey Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the CBC Poetry Prize. In 2021, she was a finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry. Her recent chapbooks include You Don’t Get Out Much (2024), I REMEMBER THE EXORCISM (Gap Riot Press, 2022), and What is Punk (2019).

Klara du Plessis is known for her contributions to long-form and translingual poetics. She is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of literary criticism, most recently Post-Mortem of the Event and Ek’t Act (Karavan Press, 2025)—the latter being her South African debut. Klara’s writing has won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2022 Critic’s Desk Award, and has been shortlisted for the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the Raymond Souster Award, among others. She holds a PhD from Concordia University and lives in Montreal.

Todd Meyers is a writer and anthropologist living in Montreal. He teaches at McGill University, where he is a professor and the Marjorie Bronfman Chair in Social Studies of Medicine. His recent books are Gone Gone (2025) and All That Was Not Her (2022), also published by Duke University Press. Of Gone Gone, Molly Young in The New York Times writes, “Over the past two decades we’ve seen a great deal of excellent reporting and fiction on the mass casualty event that is opioid addiction; this is the first account I’ve found that must be respirated rather than read.”

stephanie roberts is the prize-winning author of the poetry collections UNMET and rushes from the river disappointment, which was a finalist for the 2020 A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Her work has been critically praised and widely featured in numerous periodicals and anthologies such as Poetry, Arc Poetry, Event Magazine, The New Quarterly, Verse Daily, Crannóg (Ireland), The Stockholm Review of Literature, and elsewhere. Winner of The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018 (Black Mountain Press), she was born in Panama, grew up in NYC, and has lived most of her life in Quebec.

Gillian Sze is the author of multiple poetry books and picture books. Her collection Quiet Night Think received the Pat Lowther Memorial Award in 2023. Her books have also been finalists for various literary awards such as the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the Janet Savage Blachford Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature, the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal, and the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Awards. Gillian’s work has been translated into Slovenian, French, Italian, Turkish, Hebrew, Spanish, and Greek. She teaches creative writing and literature at Concordia University.

Shira Abramovich is a translator, editor, and interdisciplinary researcher in Montreal. Her work has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Asymptote, and Kernel Magazine, among others. With Limited Connection Collective, she has co-translated La Main de la main by Laura Vazquez, The Happy End/All Welcome by Mónica de la Torre (Joca Seria, 2022), and The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich (L’Arche, 2025). Her translation and research have been recognized by Fulbright Canada, Villa Albertine, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. She is very happy with her first name.

Lénaïg Cariou is a poet, translator, and critic. Her books of poetry include À main levée (LansKine) and La poésie n’est pas une bonne fille (Le Coin de la rue de l’Enfer, with Liliane Giraudon and Maxime Hortense Pascal). With Limited Connection Collective, she translates North American poetry into French and vice versa; together, the collective has translated works by Cole Swensen, Mónica de la Torre, Eleni Sikelianos, Laura Vazquez, Adrienne Rich, and Kay Gabriel. She is a PhD candidate at Université Paris 8, and received the Young Researcher Prize from Fondation des Treilles for her current research on poetry.

Natalia Hero is a writer and literary translator from Montreal. She holds a BA in English and Spanish Literature from Concordia University and an MA in Literary Translation from the University of Ottawa. Her novella Hum was published in 2018 by Metatron Press, and its French translation Colibri in 2019 by Marchand de feuilles. Her translation of Catherine Fred Lavarenne’s novel Fragile comme une bombe is forthcoming.

Lazer Lederhendler is a veteran literary translator specializing in Québécois fiction and non-fiction. He has also translated 20^th-century Yiddish literature. His work has earned distinctions in Canada, the UK, and the USA, most recently the French-American Foundation’s 2025 Translation Prize for The Hollow Beast. Among the authors he has translated are Gaétan Soucy, Nicolas Dickner, Edem Awumey, Perrine Leblanc, Catherine Leroux, Alain Farah, Itzik Manger and Melekh Ravitch. He lives in Montreal with the artist Pierrette Bouchard.

Aimee Wall is a writer and literary translator originally from Grand Falls-Windsor, Newfoundland and Labrador. Her novel We, Jane was shortlisted for the 2022 Amazon Canada First Novel Award and two QWF Awards. It was also longlisted for the 2021 Giller Prize and a jury selection for the 2021 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. She is the translator of six Quebec novels from the French, most recently Sadie X by Clara Dupuis-Morency, a finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Award for Translation. She lives in Montreal.

Arjun Basu is the author of the Giller-longlisted Waiting for the Man (ECW Press). He loves bourbon and plays beer league hockey very poorly. A former magazine editor, he owns a brand and content consultancy and is the host of The Full-Bleed, a podcast about the future of magazines. He lives with his wife in Montreal.

Lee Lai is an Australian cartoonist living in Tiohtià:ke (colonially known as Montreal). In 2021, she was selected as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 for her debut graphic novel, Stone Fruit. Her comics have appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, Granta, and the Museum of Modern Art’s Magazine.

Leila Marshy is the author of The Philistine (Linda Leith Publishing, 2018) and My Thievery of the People and editor of the forthcoming anthology Razing Palestine: Punishing Solidarity and Dissent in Canada (Baraka Books, 2025). Daughter of a Palestinian refugee, Marshy lived in Cairo during the First Intifada and worked for the Palestinian Red Crescent and the Palestinian Mental Health Association. She has been a community and political organizer, including founding a dialogue group with the Hasidic community in her local neighbourhood, helping elect the first Hasidic woman to public office in the world. Marshy is Fiction Editor at Baraka Books and lives in Montreal.

Heather O’Neill is a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Her novels frequently hit the number-one spot on bestseller lists. Her previous works include The Capital of Dreams, When We Lost Our Heads, The Lonely Hearts Hotel, and Lullabies for Little Criminals. She has been nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal and the Giller Prize two years in a row. O’Neill has won CBC’s Canada Reads, the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Writer’s Trust Fellowship, and the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction.

Arizona O’Neill is a Montreal author and illustrator. In addition to Valentine in Montreal, she is the illustrator of Nelly Arcan’s L’enfant dans le miroir. Her comics have appeared in Hazlitt, Exclaim!, Canadian Geographic, and the Montreal Gazette. She has created animated videos for many outlets, including CBC. A regular contributor to Radio-Canada’s Il restera toujours la culture, she is one half of the Bookstagram page @ONeillReads. Her graphic novel Opioids and Organs is coming out in May 2026 with Drawn & Quarterly.

Madeleine Thien is the author of five books, including The Book of Records, named one of Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2025, and Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Folio Prize and won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Montreal.

Eric Andrew-Gee is the Quebec correspondent for The Globe and Mail, where he has worked since 2015. He is the winner of two National Newspaper Awards, and his work has been published in The Walrus, Toronto Life, and The New Republic. A Toronto native, he studied history at McGill University and now lives in Montreal with his wife and twin toddlers. The Mind Mappers is his first book.

Amal Elsana Alh’jooj, PhD, is an Associate Professor at McGill University’s School of Social Work and the Founding Executive Director of the nonprofit organization Promoting Leadership for Empowerment, Development, and Justice (PLEDJ). For over three decades, she has advanced feminist, Indigenous, and community-driven organizing in the Middle East and Canada, bridging academia and grassroots activism. Amal has received numerous honours, including the King Charles III Coronation Medal, Genius 100 Visionaries of the Future, the New Israel Fund’s Human Rights Award, and the Victor J. Goldberg Prize for Peace in the Middle East. In 2005, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as part of the 1000 PeaceWomen initiative.

Haley Mlotek is a writer and editor based in Montreal. No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce is her first book.

Liana Cusmano (Luca/BiCurious George) is a three-time Montreal Slam Champion and 2019 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam Championship runner-up. Their novel Catch & Release was published by Guernica Editions in 2022. They were a finalist for the 2022 QWF Spoken Word Prize and winner of the 2024 Society Pages Poetry Contest. 

Octavie Doherty-Haigh is a poet, actor, and tree planter. Her work explores topics of neurodivergence, eating disorder recovery, and mental illness through the lens of love. Based in Montreal, she is currently earning her BFA in theatre acting at Concordia University.

A self-titled Jamhaitianadian, Kym Dominique-Ferguson is a Montreal spoken word artist. Through Madpoetix Productions’ curated events like Inside Madpoetix Studios, Ferguson shines a spotlight on Montreal artists. He has been a slam team member at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word multiple times, and his poetry appears in The Great Black North anthology.

Rachel McCrum’s debut collection The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate was translated by Jonathan Lamy and published in a bilingual edition with Mémoire d’encrier in 2020. With Amélie Prévost, she is the co-author and co-performer of La Belle-mère / The Stepmother (L’Hexagone, 2024). Rachel is the vocalist for Pigs&Wolves.

Robin Warren (aka Rusty) is a spoken word artist in Montreal, educated at Concordia University in Aerospace Engineering. He represented Montreal at the 2024 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam, ranking as a finalist. Recently, he performed at the 2025 Fringe Festival and is now a co-host at the Throw Poetry Collective.

Claire Sherwood is a Montreal writer, visual poet, and oral storyteller. Her poetry has appeared in Kola Magazine, carte blanche, Helios, and Lantern. Her chapbook Eat Your Words was published in 2024 by Turret House Press. She has appeared at Confabulation and the storytelling edition of QWF’s Words and Music Show.

Romel Sylne Jr, Haitian-American poet and author of five collections, writes at the crossroads of identity, resilience, and belonging. His words echo with heritage and heart, offering readers both solace and strength while transforming adversity into art that lingers long after the page is turned.

Svens Telemaque is an author, spoken-word artist, and social entrepreneur whose literary work and community leadership illuminate the power of narrative to heal and elevate. His debut book, Pen of a Ready Writer Vol. 1 (2014), challenges conventional perceptions of circumstance, faith, and emotion, inviting readers to explore nuance from cradle to grave.