PAMELA DILLON is a prize-winning writer and poet. A graduate of the University of Toronto’s creative writing program, Pamela’s short story We Come and We Go and her novel excerpt As Good as Any Other won top ten placements in the 2013 and 2015 Penguin Random House of Canada Student Award for Fiction, through the UofT School of Continuing Studies.
Pamela’s publications appear on literary websites, in the Globe and Mail, and in other print journals. Her poem, She Went to Dance, was a finalist in the Don’t Talk to Me About Love magazine’s inaugural poetry contest in 2016. In 2017, the same journal published her poems: The Winter Morning (With apologies to Mary Oliver) and The Practice of Love.
Her short story, Murmuration, was longlisted for the 2019 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction Contest and was later published in the spring 2020 edition of The New Quarterly.
Pamela won the Humber Literary Review’s 2020 Emerging Writer contest for Short Fiction with an excerpt from her novel in progress, Harvest.
Her poem Seeking the Return of My Daughter at Any Price was published in ROOM magazine, issue 44.2. Her poem When Love Drifts was published in the December 2022 issue of the Atlanta Review. Pamela's creative nonfiction essay was longlisted for the 2023 International Amy MacRae Award for Memoir.
In March 2024, her essay How to Settle an Old Dog was a shortlist winner in the 2024 gritLIT Short Story Contest, and her story, If You Are Not Coming Home by Sea, made the longlist for The New Quarterly's 2024 Peter Hinchcliffe Award.
Pamela’s creative nonfiction essay, The Visitation, won first place in the 2025 New Millennium Writings Flash Fiction Contest. Prism International published her poem, Directions For The End of Time, in its Swan Song issue 63.3.
This year, Pamela’s poem Caesura, was chosen as the honourable mention poem for the 2025 McNally Robinson Booksellers Award contest with Prairie Fire, to be published in July 2026.
Recently, Pamela was named a finalist in the 2026 Short Prose Competition for Emerging Writers by The Writers' Union of Canada for her story, How to Settle an Old Dog.
Pamela is currently working on a collection of short stories and her next poem.
