Anna Sokolova and Georgio Russell have won the 2025 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. The jury also selected five finalists: Edie Reaney Chunn, Emily Gaudet, Gwen Aube, Helen Han Wei Luo, and Mona’a Malik.
Read on for praise for the writers in their jury citations, as well as excerpts from each writer’s work.
2025 Winners
Anna Sokolova — Fragments to a Friend
Selection from Fragments to a Friend (PDF)
Anna is a Russian-Canadian writer raised in Toronto (and cyberspace). They hold an MA in English in the Field of Creative Writing from the University of Toronto, for which they completed a poetry collection. They’re currently working on the latest issue of the program’s literary journal, echolocation. They’ve had poetry printed in publications including The Strand, The Foolscap, and re-mediate, received the Alta Lind Cook prize, and got honorary mentions in the Hart House Literary Contest and the ACCUTE poetry and prose creative writing contests.
Jury Citation
“Fragments to a Friend” demonstrates extraordinary range and a fresh, inventive voice. This sequence of poems, experimenting with constraint and poetic form, writing the intimacy between women, moving between contemporary times and the ancient past, are sharp and startling. To one woman, the afterimage of a friend is a “once-in-a-decade eclipse” while another seeks to “flip a coin for a choice the size of my life.” How to name love, confess longing, or let go of a dissolving friendship? Repetition and return combine in mesmerizing ways as these fragments, at once a confession and chorus, echo from one life to the next. These poems are delicious, energetic, and playfully colloquial, exploring friendship, girlhood, and the pain of longing. We can’t wait to read more from this writer.
Georgio Russell — Regatta of Ghosts
Selection from Regatta of Ghosts (PDF)
Georgio Russell is a Bahamian writer and graduate of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. He is a fellow of the Obsidian Foundation, the Undocupoets, and is currently supported by the Toronto Arts Council. Russell has won The Editors’ Prize for Magma Poetry (2023), the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry (2024), the Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for Poetry (2025), the Missouri Review’s Poem of the Year (2025), and the Rumpus Poetry Prize (2025), judged by Kaveh Akbar. He was shortlisted for the Frontier OPEN Prize (2023), the Oxford Poetry Prize (2023), and ARC’s Poem of The Year contest (2025).
Jury Citation
Evocative, compressed, and rich in history and allusion, these meticulously crafted poems capture a whole world. Language sings and shatters in these poems, where the past is foam, flotsam and thunder upon the waters of the present. We are immersed in the “dollar-soup caf” of schooldays and hear the “boom-bap chants” of boys. We see a place where, again and again, the “path to home amends itself” and feet move in “cursive” through the “archival ocean drain.” Line after line merges the visible world with the unseen, so that sound, feeling, rupture and touch fall like waves upon the images. “Regatta of Ghosts” takes risks with language, boldly reclaiming the vocabulary of oppression with supreme confidence and style. This innovative, powerful poetry rewards the close reader, each read unpacking new surprises and meanings. Every line is written with intention.
2025 Finalists
Edie Reaney Chunn— The Letters of Puppet and Clown
Selection from The Letters of Puppet and Clown (PDF)
Edie Reaney Chunn is a white, queer poet of settler descent who lives on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. They are the second-place winner of the Vallum Chapbook Award (2025), and their poetry is forthcoming or can be found in filling Station, untethered magazine, Maisonneuve, and more. Edie enjoys working collaboratively & inefficiently on theatre projects, and other pursuits.
Jury Citation
Ranging in mood from joyous to wistful, “The Letters of Puppet and Clown,” takes playful, breathtaking leaps in language and imagination as it inhabits the voices of two extraordinarily endearing characters. A puppet dances over a keyboard; a clown has a serious thought. These poems have the loveliness and lightness of a balloon.
Emily Gaudet — Catherine and Simone
Selection from Catherine and Simone (PDF)
Emily is a poet and editor from Montreal. She has done residencies and courses at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Sage Hill Writing, and she was a recent mentee in the Quebec Writers Federation mentorship program. She holds an MA in English from Dalhousie University.
Jury Citation
Catherine of Siena and Simone Weil return in this narrative poem as wry ghosts, conveying in their own eccentric style what it’s like to be embodied—and why the attempts to transcend flesh will likely end in comedy. Urgent, inventive, evincing a deep love of language as well as a certain Beckettian interest in bodily functions, these verses create a world that’s both familiar and strange. And they remind us: we can’t go on, we’ll go on.
Gwen Aube — Missed Connections with Tall Girls
Selection from Missed Connections with Tall Girls (PDF)
Gwen Aube is a working class writer living in Montreal. Her debut collection, Missed Connections with Tall Girls, arrives spring 2026 with LittlePuss Press. Alongside Simina Banu, she edits Maybe Mag. She is the author of pulp necrosis (above/ground press, 2025).
Jury Citation
In these poems, a precise, conversational language evokes a city of sound and shifting spaces. Here, tears “glonk” on the sidewalk, mattresses are sometimes a chalice, sometimes a bowl, sometimes a god, and one’s own body does not always provide a home. Canny, understated, moving, seeking a passageway for trans lives and lives in transition, the poet’s voice creates a haunting stillness in the noise.
Helen Han Wei Luo — A Compendium of Humble Creatures
Selection from A Compendium of Humble Creatures (PDF)
Helen Han Wei Luo a Chinese-Canadian writer from Vancouver, currently pursuing her PhD in philosophy at Columbia University. Her fiction has been shortlisted at the 2023 CBC Literary Prizes and received second place at the 2024 Plentitudes Short Story Prize. Her poetry was featured in the 2023 Best of Canadian Poetry Collection.
Jury Citation
The stories of the compendium appear gently cryptic, random, curious about everything. They leap across centuries, territories and cultures, and notice mountains, animals, a variety of humans, and one particularly well-informed and underemployed android Zen master. Human foibles and illusions are noted without drama. Seemingly not much happens, yet the menagerie is busily ticking away at all times. If the planet earth wrote its own domestic microfiction, it would look like this.
Mona’a Malik — The Last Mystery
Selection from The Last Mystery (PDF)
Mona’a Malik’s work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Joyland, Event, the Coming Attractions 15 Anthology, and Carve Magazine. Her story “The Girl with Precise Interests” won the Carve Magazine Prose & Poetry Contest, and her play Sania The Destroyer was a finalist for the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s Playwriting Prize.
Jury Citation
Haunting, unsettling, and full of questions, “The Last Mystery” follows a woman urged by her father to make a strange, impossible medical decision. With crisp, straightforward prose, this piece builds a persistent sense of mystery, threat, and distrust leading to an enigmatic ending. It is a quiet story that lingers long after its final sentence.
