For more than a decade, the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award has recognized excellence in emerging, yet-to-be published Canadian writers. The 2025 prize is currently open for submissions — unpublished writers are encouraged to submit poetry, stories, essays, journalism, or prose of any kind.

This spring, several alumni of the award are celebrating new books, recognition from their peers, or their growing careers, including:

Christine Wu

The Halifax-based poet and 2023 winner, has recently published her debut poetry collection, Familial Hungers (Brick Books). In it, Christine reckons with identity, race, and fractured relationships through the lens of food. She recently spoke about it with CBC’s Atlantic Voice.

Now she is on the road: you can come hear her poetry during the second leg of her and fellow poet Jessica Bebenek’s joint book tour. Readings are planned for Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Barrie, London and Hamilton.

Deepa Rajagopalan

Deepa (2021 winner) is thriving after her short story collection, Peacocks of Instagram (House of Anansi Press), was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. This week, her debut book celebrated its one-year anniversary. In the last year, she’s appeared at both the San Miguel Writers Festival and the Imagination Festival at the Morrin Centre. Up next, catch her Writer’s Digest class on writing short stories.

Jade Wallace

Jade (2019 finalist) recently published ZZOO, a poetry collection from the collaborative writing entity, MA|DE. This spring they have been touring it across Ontario. They were recently interviewed by All Lit Up about it.

Sara Power

Sara (2022 finalist) was recognized by the BMO Winterset Awards for her debut short story collection, Art of Camouflage. The prize celebrates excellence in Newfoundland & Labrador literature.

Em Dial

Em’s (2022 winner) debut poetry book, In the Key of Decay, was longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award by The League of Canadian Poets. And, along with fellow alumn Fareh Malik, Em is also featured in the second season of Toronto’s Poems in Passage.

Jaclyn Desforges

In the last year, Jaclyn (2018 winner) has had her poetry published in two anthologies, completed teaching her first poetry class at Wilfrid Laurier University, and is looking forward to her 2026 short story debut, Weird Babies. She has also begun writing her first novel, Eyelash Person.

Books from previous RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award winners

Familial Hungers

Brick Books, 2025
Book of poetry by Christine Wu (2023 winner)

Bittersweet, numbingly spicy, herbal and milky, Familial Hungers is a lyric feast. Ginger scallion fish, Sichuan peppercorns, ginseng tea, Chinese school and white chefs – the reader’s appetite is satiated with these poems’ complex palate. There are the bubbling expectations for immigrant daughters, the chewy strands of colonial critique, and dissolving crystals of language loss. Wu relentlessly searches the grocery shelves for the hard-to-digest ingredients of identity and belonging, offering us her nourishing honesty and courage pulled from the marrow.

Streams that Lead Somewhere

Mawenzi House, 2022
Book of poetry by Fareh Malik (2022 winner)

Fareh Malik’s debut collection aims to explore the intersection between mental illness and social racialization. The poet dives deep into his long history with Islamophobia, racism, and other forms of discrimination. The book focuses on perseverance and the silver lining that is ever on the horizon with the expectation that you can make it out of any trial or tribulation, if you just follow your dream to wherever it leads.

Peacocks of Instagram

House of Anansi, 2024
Collection of short stories by Deepa Rajagopalan (2021 winner)

An underappreciated coffee shop server haunted by her past attracts thousands of followers on social media with her peacock jewellery. A hotel housekeeper up against a world of gender and class inequity quietly gets revenge on her chauvinist boss. And a foster child, orphaned in an accident directly attributable to climate change, brings down her foster father, an oil lobbyist, in spectacular fashion.

With an intense awareness of privilege and the lack of it, the fourteen stunning stories in Peacocks of Instagram explore what it means to be safe, to survive, and to call a place home.

In the Key of Decay

Palimpsest Press, 2024
Book of poetry by Em Dial (2020 winner)

Triangulated against the backdrop of a deteriorating world, In the Key of Decay pushes past borders both real and imagined to attend to those failed by history. Attuned to scientific racism, systemic medical failures, and climate change, Em Dial’s poems incisively carve out space for interrogation. Their place-finding and place-making is often surprising, centring care and desire, where Dial’s speaker “calls for someone to call me what I am and for that someone to be a lover, bare on silk sheets, inside walls of confidential lilac.” In the Key of Decay doesn’t just hum along, it sings.

Washes, Prays

McClelland & Stewart, 2020
Book of poetry by Noor Naga (2019 winner), author also of the novel If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English

Danger Flower

Palimpsest Press, 2021
Book of poetry by Jaclyn Desforges (2018 winner), also author of Weird Babies (Gordon Hill Press/Porcupine’s Quill, 2026) and Why Are You So Quiet (Annick Press, 2020)

A baby transforms into a reverse mermaid in a baptism gone wrong. After being stepped on, a snail exacts revenge. In Danger Flower, Jaclyn Desforges leads enlightened witnesses through a wild garden where archetypal tales are treated with tongue-in-cheek irreverence. Amidst nesting dolls and opossums, poison oak and Tamagotchis, the poet navigates gender roles, sexual indiscretions, episodic depression, and mothering, forming essential survival strategies for a changing world. Danger Flower is a necessary debut.

Let the World Have You

House of Anansi Press, 2022
Book of poetry by Mikko Harvey (2017 winner), also author of Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit (House of Anansi Press, 2018)

Mikko Harvey’s new collection invites readers into a world that is and is not the world we know. In poems at once surreal, satiric, and tender, we encounter a cast of surprising non-human characters — the bear who sells herbal remedies, the politically influential lizard, the mean butterfly — yet at the core of this book is Harvey’s impulse to confront the challenges of human intimacy. Let the World Have You is a vibrant report on the ways in which we are delightfully, awkwardly, heartbreakingly entangled: with each other, with the environment we inhabit, and with the psychological environments that inhabit us.

Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit

House of Anansi Press, 2024
Novel by Nadine Sander-Green (2015 winner)

A woman’s coming-of-age through a toxic relationship, isolation, and betrayal—set against the stark landscape of the far north.

Millicent is a shy, 24-year-old reporter who moves to Whitehorse to work for a failing daily newspaper. With winter looming and the Yukon descending into darkness, Millicent begins a relationship with Pascal, an eccentric and charming middle-aged filmmaker who lives on a converted school bus in a Walmart parking lot. What begins as a romantic adventure soon turns toxic, and Millicent finds herself struggling not to lose herself and her voice.

Events come to a head at Thaw di Gras, a celebration in faraway Dawson City marking the return of light to the north. It’s here, in a frontier mining town filled with drunken tourists, eclectic locals, and sparkling burlesque dancers, that Millicent must choose between staying with Pascal or finally standing up to her abuser.

In the style of Ottessa Moshfegh’s honest exploration of dysfunctional relationships, and with the warmth and energy of Heather O’Neill, Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit illuminates what it’s like to be young, impulsive, and in love in one of the harshest environments in the world.

Whistle Stops: A Locomotive Serial Poem

Signature Editions, 2017
Book of poetry by Emily Izsak (2014 winner)

Whistle Stops: A Locomotive Serial Poem occurs over a series of train rides between Toronto and London, Ontario. Each segment of the poem, marked by a time stamp and train number, occupies one train ride. Whistle Stops explores the connections between forward motion as a function of Spicerian serial poetry and forward motion as a function of railway travel.

Circus

Penguin Random House/McClelland and Stewart, 2014
Short story collection by Claire Battershill (2013 winner), also author of several academic publications

Ladies and gentlemen! Boys and girls! Step right up and prepare to be dazzled by this delightful debut from Claire Battershill, winner of the CBC Literary Award, co-winner of the Canadian Authors Association’s Emerging Writer Award, and finalist for the inaugural PEN International/New Voices Award. As they transport us from a crowded airport departure lounge to the stillness of the British Museum, and from the spectacle of the Winter Olympics to the modesty of a local Miniatureland, these radiant stories explore the often surprising things we’re willing to do for love and human connection. Fed up with his long history of failed blind dates, a shy English bureaucrat gives himself thirty-one days to find love on the Internet. A father buys his daughter a blue plastic tent to ready her for outdoor adventure, but neither is prepared when the tent becomes a neighbourhood sensation. The world of competitive sports provides the backdrop for a young man’s coming of age in “Two-Man Luge: A Love Story.” And in the award-winning title story, the granddaughter of a former circus performer (who played the role of a man-wrestling bear) finds herself grappling with the capriciousness of life and love.

At once witty, tender-hearted, and profound, these stories are filled with a memorable and all-too-human cast of characters on the cusp of enormous change – whether they’re ready or not. Written in spare yet startling language, Circus is a beautiful reminder that sometimes everyday life can be the greatest show on Earth.