CBC Books' writers to watch: 30 Canadian writers making their mark in 2023
CBC Books has announced this year's writers to watch list! Here are 30 Canadian writers on the rise in 2023.
Jamaluddin Aram
Jamaluddin Aram is a Toronto-based documentary filmmaker, producer and writer from Kabul, Afghanistan. Aram's short story This Hard Easy Life was a finalist for RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in 2020. He has been published in literary magazines Numero Cinq and Blood and Bourbon.
In 2020, he was selected as a mentee by Michael Christie for the Writers' Trust of Canada Mentorship program for his book Marchoba, which became his debut novel Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday — a portrayal of everyday life in an Afghan neighbourhood during the country's civil war in the 1990s.
Britta Badour
Britta Badour, also known as spoken word poet Britta B, is a writer and educator from Kingston, Ont. She was named Toronto Arts Foundation's Emerging Artist in 2021 and has been featured on CBC Arts, TEDx and more. Badour educates across North America leading classrooms in poetry and performance with an emphasis on social justice work.
-
'I see all the armour you wear': Watch Britta B inspire with her poem of empowerment for young women
Badour's debut poetry collection, Wires that Sputter explores themes of Black liberation, pop culture and family through her emotional verse.
Mitali Banerjee Ruths
Mitali Banerjee Ruths is a Montreal-based children's book writer, pediatrician and creative director at a software company. Her previous books include picture book Archie Celebrates Diwali, the early readers series The Inside Scouts and The Party Diaries series. Her children's books feature South Asian characters on humourous and vibrant adventures.
Banerjee Ruths' latest story in The Party Diaries series, Top Secret Anniversary is set to be released this fall.
D.M. Bradford
D.M. Bradford is a poet, editor and organizer based in Montreal. Their work has appeared in The Capilano Review, The Tiny, The Fiddlehead and Carte Blanche. They are a founding editor of House House Press.
Bradford's debut poetry collection, Dream of No One But Myself, brings together prose poems, verse and photographs to examine the experience and challenges of growing up in a "troubled" mixed-race family in Montreal's South Shore neighbourhood. It won the 2022 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, was a finalist for the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry, shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize and was longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best debut book.
New works from Bradford in 2023 include Bottom Rail on Top, a hybrid poetry collection focused on Black histories of antebellum life, and House Within a House, a French translation of Chilean-born Quebec queer poet Nicholas Dawson's Désormais, ma demeure.
Charlene Carr
Charlene Carr is a Toronto-raised writer and author based in Nova Scotia whose work explores truth in fiction. She is the author of several independently published novels and novellas.
Her first novel with a major publisher is Hold My Girl, which is a dual narrative novel about two women, Katherine and Tess, whose eggs are switched during IVF. It explores the complexities of love, motherhood and racial identity, and was optioned in 2023 by production company Blink Studios for a series adaptation.
Corinna Chong
Corinna Chong is a writer and professor based in Kelowna, B.C., teaching English and fine arts at Okanagan College. She published her debut novel, Belinda's Rings, in 2013 and her short fiction has been published in magazines across Canada, including the Malahat Review, Room, Grain and The Humber Literary Review.
Chong's first collection of short stories, The Whole Animal, examines the power, strangeness and attributes of human and animal bodies — revealing themes of loneliness, loss and self-discovery. In 2021, she won the CBC Short Story Prize for Kids in Kindergarten which appears in The Whole Animal.
Nina Dunic
Nina Dunic is a freelance writer and journalist living in Scarborough. She has been longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize four times: in 2023 for The Artist, in 2022 for Youth, in 2020 for Bodies and in 2019 for an earlier version of Bodies.
She also won the Toronto Star Short Story Contest twice, took third place in Humber Literary Review Emerging Writers Fiction Contest and has been nominated for the Journey Prize.
Her debut novel The Clarion is coming out with Invisible Publishing in September, with her collection of stories following in 2025.
André Forget
André Forget is a Toronto-born writer and editor currently based in England. He is the former editor-in-chief of The Puritan and his writing has been featured in many publications like The Walrus and the Southwest Review. His debut novel, In the City of Pigs was longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize and shortlisted for the 2023 Amazon First Novel Award.
In the City of Pigs is a novel that follows a failed musician trying his hand at journalism in the big and daunting city of Toronto. Forget is currently working on a book of non-fiction about propaganda.
Tomas Hachard
Tomas Hachard is a writer and former NPR critic born in Argentina and raised in Toronto. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Literary Review of Canada and The Globe and Mail among other publications.
His debut novel City in Flames is a dystopian love story between a struggling grad student and an IT worker. As questions of politics, long-distance and their future loom, the story represents the isolation of human relationships.
Nicholas Herring
Nicholas Herring is a writer and carpenter from Murray Harbour, P.E.I. His writing has been in publications like The Fiddlehead and The Puritan. In 2022, Herring was the recipient of the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for Some Hellish.
Some Hellish is Herring's debut novel about a lobster fisher facing the existential dread of his boring, mundane life. That is, until he finds himself in the most absurd of circumstances including a near-death experience. Forced to reckon with himself, the novel explores the meaning of being alive.
Matthew Hollett
Matthew Hollett is a writer and artist based in St. John's, NL. In 2020, Hollett won the CBC Poetry Prize for Tickling the Scar. Before that, he was on the CBC Poetry Prize longlist in 2016 for Merchant Vessel and Bomb Crater Behind Vimy Station; he also made the longlist for the 2017 CBC Nonfiction Prize for Painting the Curlew. He published his debut book Album Rock, in 2018.
His newest poetry collection Optic Nerve challenges perceptions through witty poems about visions, photography and everyday sights.
Jessica Johns
Jessica Johns is a nehiyaw writer, visual artist and member of Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 Territory in northern Alberta. Her writing has been featured in Brick Magazine, The Globe and Mail and Glass Buffalo, and she currently serves on the editorial board for Guts – An Anti-Colonial Feminist Magazine.
The winning short story of the 2020 Writers' Trust Journey Prize, Bad Cree went on to become the debut horror-infused novel from Johns. The novel is about an Indigenous character's attempt to reconnect with their land and culture amidst terrifying nightmares.
Bad Cree was shortlisted for the 2023 Amazon First Novel Award and won MacEwan University's Book of the Year Award.
Christine Lai
Christine Lai is a Vancouver-based writer with a PhD in English Literature from University. College London. Her debut novel Landscapes was shortlisted for the inaugural Novel Prize from New Directions Publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions and Giramondo Publishing.
Landscapes is Lai's first novel set in our world in the near future amidst ecological disaster. Told through the narrative of Penelope as well as diary entries, Landscapes blends the country house novel with geopolitics.
Heather Marshall
Heather Marshall is a writer from Toronto. She holds two master's degrees in Canadian history and political science and pivoted to writing fiction after working for many years in politics and communications. Her debut novel Looking for Jane was named one of Indigo's Top 10 Books of 2022 and Globe & Mail's Top 100 Books of 2022.
Looking for Jane is Marshall's debut historical fiction novel about underground abortion access in 1970s Toronto.
She is currently working on her next book which is set to be released in 2024.
David Martin
David Martin is a poet and literary instructor in Calgary. He won the CBC Poetry Prize for his poem Tar Swan in 2014 and went on to publish it as a book-length narrative poem in 2018. As an organizer for the Single Onion Poetry Series, Martin continues to establish himself as a literary voice in the landscape of prairie poetry.
Martin's upcoming poetry collection Kink Bands explores Canadian landscapes and "fossilized" towns and is set to be released this September.
Michelle Min Sterling
Michelle Min Sterling was born on Vancouver Island, B.C. and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches literature and writing at Berklee College of Music. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The Baffler, Vice and Joyland.
Her debut novel Camp Zero is a dystopian thriller set in 2049, where the social order is marked by climate change and digital technology.
Sheila Murray
Sheila Murray is a writer born and raised in England who now lives in Hamilton, Ont. Her work has appeared in publications like The Dalhousie Review and The New Quarterly. She was named by CBC Books as a Black writer to watch in 2023.
Her debut book Finding Edward is a novel about a man named Cyril Rowntree who discovers letters from the 1920s which tell the story of a white mother who gave up her mixed race son, Edward, for adoption. Relating to Edward, Cyril goes on a journey of personal discovery and exploration of Canada's Black history.
Finding Edward was a finalist for the 2022 Goveror General's Literary Award for fiction and on the Canada Reads 2023 longlist.
Mai Nguyen
Mai Nguyen was raised in Halifax and currently lives in Toronto. She has written for publications such as Wired, The Washington Post, The Toronto Star as a journalist and copywriter.
Her debut novel Sunshine Nails, is a humorous and heartfelt novel about a Vietnamese Canadian family who are trying to keep their family business, a nail salon called Sunshine Nails, open. Family relationships are put to the test as they work together to save their nail salon.
Janika Oza
Janika Oza is a writer, educator and graduate student based in Toronto. She won the 2019 Malahat Review Open Season Award in fiction for her short story Exile, the 2020 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Award and the 2022 O. Henry Award. Her writing is published in a number of journals, including The Columbia Review, Into The Void, Hobart and Looseleaf Magazine.
Her debut novel, A History of Burning, is an intimate family saga about colonialism and migration. Oza made the 2019 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for her story The Gift of Choice, which is a chapter in A History of Burning.
William Ping
William Ping is a writer and CBC journalist at St. John's bureau. He completed his Master of Arts at Memorial University and received the English department's Award for Thesis Excellence for the book he wrote for his master's degree.
This book would be his debut novel Hollow Bamboo published by HarperCollins which was a shortlisted finalist for the 2023 Amazon First Novel Award. Taking place in Newfoundland, it is a story about two William Pings — a millennial in the present with a realization that he needs to learn more about his Chinese heritage and his grandfather in the past who came to Newfoundland from China to work in a laundry in 1931.
Emily Riddle
Emily Riddle is a nêhiyaw writer who is a member of the Alexander First Nation (Kipohtakaw) in Treaty Six Territory. She is the senior advisor of Indigenous relations at the Edmonton Public Library and has been published in various publications such as the Washington Post, the Globe and Mail, Teen Vogue, the Malahat Review and Room.
Riddle's debut poetry collection The Big Melt is part memoir, part research project and draws on Riddle's experience working in Indigenous governance and her affection for confessional poetry in crafting feminist works that are firmly rooted in place. Her work is rooted in nêhiyaw thought and urban millennial life events. She won the first-ever Griffin Poetry Prize Canadian First Book Prize for The Big Melt in 2022, and her 2020 CBC Poetry Prize shortlisted work, the poem Learning to Count, is featured in The Big Melt.
Liselle Sambury
Liselle Sambury is a Trinidadian Canadian writer and blogger. Her debut fantasy novel, Blood Like Magic, was on the shortlist for the 2021 Governor General's Literary award for young people's literature — text. She shares her experiences writing speculative fiction centred on young Black characters to thousands of followers on Youtube and TikTok. She's currently based in Toronto.
Sambury's first horror YA novel, Delicious Monsters, is an eerie story about Daisy who sees ghosts and another girl ten years later piecing together a supernatural mystery.
Jasmine Sealy
Jasmine Sealy is a Barbadian Canadian writer. She completed her MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia and won the 2020 UBC/HarperCollins Best New Fiction Prize for the story she wrote for her master's thesis.
Awarded literary representation and a book publication from HarperCollins, the Vancouver-based writer transformed her thesis into The Island of Forgetting, which won the $60K Amazon First Novel Award.
Sealy's short fiction has been shortlisted for several awards and longlisted in 2017 for the CBC Short Story Prize.
Sarah Suk
Sarah Suk is a Korean Canadian writer based in Vancouver. In 2021, she was selected as one of the BIPOC writers in the Writers' Trust of Canada's Amplified Voices program – an initiative which started in 2020 to promote and mentor new authors. Her debut novel Made in Korea is a YA rom-com about two students with warring Korean skincare businesses operated out of their high school.
Suk's upcoming YA book The Space Between Here & Now is set to be released this fall. The novel follows a teen girl with the ability to time travel based on memories. When she's sent into her estranged mother's memory, she's determined to piece together what truly happened and travels to Korea in search of answers and belonging.
Darcy Tamayose
Darcy Tamayose is a writer, graphic designer and PhD student from southern Alberta. Based in Lethbridge, her work includes the novel Odori, which received the Canada-Japan Literary Award, and the YA book Katie Be Quiet that was shortlisted for Foreword INDIES Juvenile Fiction Award.
Tamayose's latest book Ezra's Ghosts is a collection of fantastical short stories, where she introduces a cast of characters whose lives intersect in a quiet prairie town called Ezra. It was a finalist for the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and for the 2023 Alberta Book Publishing Awards.
Saeed Teebi
Saeed Teebi is a writer and lawyer who grew up in Kuwait and is currently based in Toronto. In 2021, his short story Her First Palestinian was shortlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize. Teebi went on to publish his debut collection under the same name. Her First Palestinian was one of five books shortlisted for the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Prize for Fiction.
Her First Palestinian is a collection of short stories about characters grappling with their experiences as Palestinian immigrants in Canada.
Kai Thomas
Kai Thomas is a writer, carpenter and land steward. Born and raised in Ottawa, he is of Black and mixed heritage descended from Trinidad and the British Isles.
His first novel, In the Upper Country, was published to national and international reviews. It is a fictional portrayal of mid-19th century southern Ontario through the eyes of a young Black journalist. When a woman escaping the U.S. through the Underground Railroad kills a slave hunter, Lensinda is enlisted to interview her from jail. This interaction reveals an extraordinary range of stories, secrets and untold histories, including those of Black refugee communities and Indigenous nations around the Great Lakes.
Anuja Varghese
Anuja Varghese is a Hamilton, Ont.-based writer and editor. Her stories have been recognized in the Prism International Short Fiction Contest, the Alice Munro Festival Short Story Competition and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She has been published in various publications including The Malahat Review, Plenitude Magazine and The Fiddlehead.
Her debut short story collection Chrysalis examines the ways in which racialized women are undermined and exploited and the ways in which they reclaim their power.
LISTEN | Anuja Varghese shares inspiration behind Chrysalis:
Jack Wong
Jack Wong is a Halifax-based children's writer and illustrator born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver. His debut picture book When You Can Swim won the 2023 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award. In his free time, Wong volunteers with IBBY Canada's Reading with Newcomer Children program.
When You Can Swim is a children's picture book based on Wong's own experience as a child overcoming his fear of swimming. Illustrating kids from different backgrounds, Wong writes from his unique perspective as a Chinese immigrant in Canada.
A. Light Zachary
A. Light Zachary is a writer, editor and teacher living in Toronto and Grande-Digue, N.B. Zachary was longlisted twice for the 2021 CBC Poetry Prize, for their poems Two Girls and Why bury yourself in this place you ask. They were also awarded a fellowship in poetry by the Lambda Literary Foundation and a writing studio fellowship at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
Their debut poetry collection, More Sure, is about the process of finding oneself again and again through time, experience and community. Themes of queerness, neurodivergence, labour, love and family are explored.
