2025 Literary Award Grand Prize: Mohamed Hammoud
A child’s life is split by a siren that rips the ordinary day apart — the beginning of exile, of loss, and of a name given and taken. From the sun-baked streets of Beirut to a new life in London, Ontario, this is a story about what happens when you carry a homeland inside you while learning to survive somewhere else. Tender, fierce, and memory-rich, the narrative tracks one family’s decision to leave, the small rituals that keep them human, and the quiet work of reclaiming selfhood in a world that keeps renaming you…
2025 Literary Award Honourable Mention: Ana-Maria Posada-Borda
Between the city streets of Montreal and the quiet rhythm of family drives, a young woman learns that identity isn’t a destination—it’s a motion between two worlds. Torn between her Colombian roots and Quebec upbringing, she discovers that belonging isn’t about choosing sides but weaving them together. In the silence of a twenty-two-minute car ride, she begins to understand that home lives not in geography, but in the stories we carry forward…
2025 Literary Award Honourable Mention: Irene Yi
Between two names—Fan and Ivy—lies a life divided by language, history, and survival. From Wuhan to Ottawa, she navigates racism, silence, and the relentless performance of belonging. As she questions who she is allowed to be in either world, her voice rises—fragile yet defiant—into a declaration of dual existence. This is a story of migration as metamorphosis, where speaking becomes an act of reclaiming the self…
2025 Literary Award Honourable Mention: Keiko Honda
After a life in cancer epidemiology and a sudden disability, a woman finds herself uprooted and unmoored—until community becomes the studio that calls her into being. Through accessible salons, surprising collaborators, and a series of small, brave experiments, she discovers that art isn’t a prize reserved for the few: it’s the act of bringing your perspective into the world. This memoir traces the slow, beautiful alchemy of identity, where losses transmute into creative belonging and a neighbourhood becomes a sheltering atelier…
2025 Literary Award Honourable Mention: Morsal Yakuby
An artist reflects on the ache of loss, the tenderness of memory, and the search for a home that exists between cultures. Through her mother’s resilience, her family’s escape from war in Afghanistan, and her own struggle for voice and belonging, she comes to see that home is not a place—it’s a feeling, a legacy, and a language of love that outlives fear…
2025 Literary Award Honourable Mention: The Prairie Collective
A conversation across generations: one voice arrived as an adult immigrant; the other was raised in the aftermath. Through kitchen memories, scraped knees, milk-bottles left at bedside, and a pilgrimage back to India, the two trace what gets inherited across migration—grief, caution, courage, and the slow construction of belonging. Honest, intimate, and unexpectedly tender, this dialogue reveals how migration builds family architecture: a living repository of stories, each retelling a beam, each memory a brick…
2025 Literary Award Honourable Mention: Elisa Bryce
A fiddle tune, an attic, a soldier’s cough—and a life that crosses an ocean. War Brides follows women whose loves stitched continents together after the war. It’s a vividly human account of travel, adaptation, and the strange comforts of music and community when cities lie wrecked and new worlds feel raw and foreign. With tenderness, humour, and plainspoken courage, the story maps how love rebuilds ordinary rituals—kitchen dances, milking cows, and kitchen parties—and how those rituals anchor a life remade far from home…
2025 Literary Award Honourable Mention: Brenna Tomas
A family history of migration becomes a living classroom for radical hospitality and reimagined learning. Tracing Nonna’s voyage from Italy to North America, this piece links personal memory to educational theory and asks: how do communities cultivate belonging that values difference rather than erases it? By weaving academic insight with intimate recollection, the story invites readers to see migration as an experiential archive—a series of missteps, lobster-shell sheds, and small acts of resilience that together teach us how to belong differently…