Maria Reva, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson win Writers’ Trust Awards

TORONTO — Maria Reva didn’t expect her Ukraine-set satire “Endling” to win any awards — she didn’t even think she would finish writing it.

That’s why, she said as she accepted the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize on Thursday night, she didn’t write a speech and instead read an email she wrote to her editors earlier in the day.

“It’s a book that gets nominated, but not one that wins prizes, which is absolutely lovely and I am happy as a clam,” she read aloud.

“‘Endling’ just does not inspire consensus. And it’s not an easy book to love.”

The jurors for the $70,000 literary award disagreed.

“‘Endling’s’ brilliance lies in Reva’s willingness to yank on the dangling thread of the unanswerable, unravelling the whole genre, only to masterfully stitch it back together again,” the jurors wrote in their citation.

The book follows three women in Ukraine’s bridal tourism industry whose ill-conceived kidnapping scheme is interrupted by Russia’s invasion in 2022.

“Endling” takes a sharp pivot halfway through as Reva writes herself into the book, forcing the reader to consider the sorts of stories people tell about Ukraine and the way we tell stories about ourselves.

“This book, it was so difficult to write and I gave up on it multiple times,” Reva said in a brief interview after the ceremony. “The only goal I had in mind was just to finish it, and I didn’t really see a future beyond that finishing line. Everything — this is just one big bonus.”

Reva’s first book, the 2020 short story collection “Good Citizens Need Not Fear,” was also a finalist for the Writers’ Trust fiction prize.

Reva’s was one of seven awards worth hundreds of thousands of dollars handed out at the ceremony hosted by Mattea Roach.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson won the $75,000 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction for her book “Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead,” which explores the lessons to be learned from the interconnectedness of water in its various forms.

As she accepted the award, Simpson thanked the Indigenous storytellers and writers who came before her.

“The ones who told stories quietly and constantly to strengthen our hearts and minds and connections, who did not put their name on a book or seek to win a prize, but who aimed to build the worlds,” she said.

“Simpson’s brilliant and sintering weave of story, research and Nishnaabeg teachings offers a generous and transformative perspective on world-building. ‘Theory of Water’ shows us how to reimagine life as we know it, embodying hope,” the jury wrote in its citation.

Roza Nozari won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers for her memoir “All the Parts We Exile,” in which she examines her family’s flight from Iran and her own queer identity.

Nozari opened her speech by thanking the Iranian women who stood up and fought against gender apartheid as she was writing the book. She applauded their courage for speaking up when it was neither convenient nor safe to do so.

“I think now more than ever — or maybe now just as much as ever — the courage for us as artists to say what needs to be said with the urgency in which we need to be saying it is incredibly important,” she said.

A handful of authors also won awards celebrating their careers, including Bren Simmers, who received the $60,000 Latner Griffin Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, and “Mabel Murple” author Sheree Fitch, who got the $40,000 Matt Cohen Award: In Celebration of a Writing Life.

Meanwhile, Julie Flett won the $40,000 Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People, and Kim Thúy won the $25,000 Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award, which is meant to encourage an author with a remarkable body of work to keep on writing.

The other fiction finalists for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize this year included the short story collections “Graveyard Shift at the Lemonade Stand” by Tim Bowling and “Simple Creatures” by Robert McGill, and the novels “We, the Kindling” by Otoniya J. Okot Bitek and “Julius Julius” by Aurora Stewart de Peña.

The remaining non-fiction finalists were Miriam Toews for “A Truce That Is Not Peace”; Omar El Akkad for “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This”; Tessa McWatt for “The Snag: A Mother, A Forest, and Wild Grief”; and Vinh Nguyen for The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 13, 2025.