Nancy Huggett has won the 2024 RBC PEN Canada New Voices Award. For her winning submission, Revelation, she will receive a $3,000 cash prize and mentorship from a Canadian author.
A jury of Canadian writers, including Sharon Bala, Dimitri Nasrallah, and Sarmishta Subramanian, chose Huggett through a blind adjudication process from 560 entries, nearly double the number of entries from the previous year.
“A clear cohesion emerges in this epic work, in the interplay of illness and healing, making and breaking, and in the delicate engagement with the religious theme implied in the title,” reads the jury citation. “We were struck by the work’s powerful emotional resonance and its brave exploration of a felt experience.”
Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes, lives, and caregives on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). She collaborates with several writing groups, including Firefly Creative, Merritt Writers, Trailheads, not-the-rodeo poets, and Kairos. Her writing has been published in literary magazines, including American Literary Review, Event, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Fire, and The New Quarterly. At 66, she is the oldest person to win the RBC PEN Canada New Voices Award.
The jury also selected four finalists: Georgio Russell (Saltborne), Monica Nathan (Between Spaces), Hajera Khaja (The Rupture), and Tessa Swackhammer (A Man Called Evergreen).
Now celebrating its 11th anniversary, the RBC PEN Canada New Voices Award encourages new writing and provides a space for unpublished Canadian writers, aged 17 and over. Previous winners include Christine Wu, Fareh Malik, Em Dial and Deepa Rajagopalan.
The award is funded by the RBC Emerging Artists Program, which supports the arts and the role they play in building vibrant communities and strong economies. Since its inception, the program has supported over 35,000 emerging artists across the globe.
THE FINALISTS
Georgio Russell — Saltborne
Selection from Saltborne (PDF)
Georgio Russell is a Bahamian writer and an alumnus of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, as well as the Obsidian Foundation. He is a past winner of The Editors’ Prize for Magma Poetry (2023) and the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize (2024). He was shortlisted for the Frontier OPEN Prize (2022 and 2023) and the Oxford Poetry Prize (2023). His work has been published in Yolk Literary Magazine, Frontier Poetry, The London Magazine, Lolwe, Cordite, Magma, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. (Photo courtesy of Georgio Russell)
Jury Citation
The ambition of this accomplished work, and the freshness and force of the voice, made it a serious contender for finalist. While traversing multiple times and places, the collection has real cohesion. The language and visual imagery are precise and powerful, and we were struck by the profound reflections on migration and home and legacy. “I flower from the bowel of a spoiled history”—wow, though we could quote dozens of wonderful lines. And we loved the recurrence of the dogs – from the red herring in the mother’s mind to the reminder of a human’s howling.
Monica Nathan — Between Spaces
Selection from Between Spaces (PDF)
Monica Nathan is a Pushcart-nominated writer with work featured or forthcoming in various publications including The Fiddlehead, The Feathertale Review, and EVENT where it was recently shortlisted for their non-fiction contest. She is a Tin House alumni and a recipient of Diaspora Dialogue’s mentorship program. She is a Contributing Editor at Barren Magazine, an advisor for the Festival of Literary Diversity, and is currently working on her first novel. She lives in Toronto with her husband and two kids. (Photo credit Erin Brooks)
Jury Citation
This story engaged us from the very beginning. We appreciated the skillful handling of multiple narrative threads, the use of flashbacks without bogging the reader down, and the wonderful touches of humour. We appreciated that there is an unknowability to the protagonist’s motivations, to the way she is using the boyfriend, the boyfriend’s grandmother (useful in resurrecting her own), and the uncle (she stows away memories that might be useful to her later). There is a hierarchy to this entire cast of characters; each is there to play a certain role. For some on the jury, this story vivified the familiar in splendid detail; for others, it was a revelation without a hint of the didactic.
Hajera Khaja — The Rupture
Selection from The Rupture (PDF)
Hajera Khaja’s writing has appeared in various literary magazines including, Joyland, The Humber Literary Review, The Ex-Puritan, and others. She was longlisted for the 2019 Journey Prize and has been awarded grants by the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts. Hajera is currently working on final edits of her short story collection. She lives in Mississauga, Ontario, with her husband and two young boys. (Photo credit Soko Negash)
Jury Citation
This story drew us in with its quiet, taut tension. The writing is clear and not flashy; the quality of the craft is evident throughout, and particularly in the shading of the supporting characters, each of whom is negotiating in her own way the presence of the father. The jurors all appreciated the surprise of the ending and the sudden resulting shift in point of view. The rupture is not where we imagined it to be, and this story turns out to not be a story about the father. We are forced to read the events in a new light, with some questions about the narrator’s own part in the family system, all of which add richness.
Tessa Swackhammer — A Man Called Evergreen
Selection from A Man Called Evergreen (PDF)
Tessa Swackhammer is a queer writer based in Hamilton, ON. She has been published in a myriad of national and international literary magazines including Grain Magazine, Ocotillo Review, Sans Press, and more. Her work has previously been long-listed for the CBC Short Story Prize and shortlisted for the New Millennium Writing Awards. Much of her inspiration stems from the examination of trauma and “otherness” and how they shape the way we experience and interact with the world. (Photo credit Kit Swackhammer)
Jury Citation
This story displayed a rare and remarkable confidence. We were gripped by the controlled narrative, and the voice of its haunting, and haunted, narrator. Garrett tells us he understands things in pieces, and this is the way we, too, see his world. The story’s themes of imprisonment and escape, of trauma and rescue and betrayal, unspool skillfully, and we appreciated the quiet humour. Some of the story’s ghosts – a bit of key left in a lock, the sign on a lamppost that the narrator imagines stands in for him – stayed with us long after.
THE WINNER
Nancy Huggett — Revelation
Selection from Revelation (PDF)
Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes, lives, and caregives on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Thanks to the writers who support and inspire her—Firefly Creative, Merritt Writers, Trailheads, not-the-rodeo poets, and Kairos—she has work in American Literary Review, Event, One Art, Pinhole, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Fire, and The New Quarterly. She’s won some awards, has a gazillion rejections, and is completing a poetry manuscript about brain injury and caregiving. (Photo courtesy of Nancy Huggett)
Jury Citation
We can see in the confidence of the voice, the experimentation with form and narrative, and the skillful exploration of themes the work of an accomplished poet who understands the craft. A clear cohesion emerges in this epic work, in the interplay of illness and healing, making and breaking (strokes that create paintings and explode brains), and in the delicate engagement with the religious theme implied in the title. We were struck by the work’s powerful emotional resonance and its brave exploration of a felt experience. And we loved the intrusion poems.
