Canisia Lubrin wins $10K Danuta Gleed Literary Award for best debut short story collection
The Ontario poet and writer is recognized for her debut short story collection Code Noir
Ontario author Canisia Lubrin has won the 2024 Danuta Gleed Literary Award for her debut short story collection Code Noir.
The $10,000 award is given out annually to the year's best first collection of short fiction. Two additional prizes of $1,000 were also awarded to runners up Vincent Anioke for Perfect Little Angels and Nicola Winstanley for Smoke.
Administered by The Writers' Union of Canada, the award is funded by John Gleed in memory of his wife, writer Danuta Gleed. Her short fiction won numerous awards before she died in 1996 and her short fiction book, One of the Chosen, was published posthumously.
The Code Noir, or the Black Code, was a set of 59 articles decreed by Louis XVI in 1685 which regulated ownership of slaves in all French colonies. In Code Noir, Lubrin reflects on these codes to examine the legacy of enslavement and colonization — and the inherent power of Black resistance.
Lubrin is a writer, editor and teacher. Her debut poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis was longlisted for the Gerald Lambert Award, the Pat Lowther Award and was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award.
Her poetry collection The Dyzgraphxst,won the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. It won the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2020 Governor General's Literary Prize for poetry.
Code Noir was also shortlisted for the 2024 Atwood Gibson Fiction prize, the Trillium Book Award and won the 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.
Vincent Anioke was born and raised in Nigeria and now lives in Waterloo. Ont. He has been a finalist for the 2023 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and the Commonwealth Story Prize, and won the Austin Clarke Fiction Prize in 2021. His short story Utopia was longlisted for the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize. His work has been featured in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Rumpus, The Masters Review and Passages North.
Winstanley is a writer and professor based in Hamilton, Ont. She is the author of How to Teach Your Cat a Trick and How to Give Your Cat a Bath, which was a finalist for the 2019 Governor General's Literary Award for young people's literature — illustration.
This year's jury were Francine Cunningham, Kim Fu, and D.A. Lockhart.
Last year's winner was Lisa Alward for her collection Cocktail.
Other past winners include Zalika Reid-Benta, Carrianne Leung, David Bezmozgis, Ian Williams and Heather O'Neill.
