The Writers’ Union of Canada is pleased to announce the short list of nominees for the 29th annual Danuta Gleed Literary Award. The Award recognizes the best first collection of short fiction by a Canadian author published in 2025 in the English language. The winner receives a prize of $10,000 and the finalists each receive $1,000.
The jury this year comprises authors Lisa Alward, Waubgeshig Rice, and Anuja Varghese, who determined the short list from 18 collections submitted, some by seasoned writers, others by authors being published for the first time. Those finalists are:
Caitlin Galway, A Song for Wildcats (Rare Machines)
Catherine Hunter, Seeing You Home (Signature Editions)
Mikka Jacobsen, Good Victory (Freehand Books)
Tracey Lindberg, The Cree Word for Love: Sâkihitowin (HarperAvenue)
Leila Marshy, My Thievery of the People (Baraka Books)
The winner will be announced in June.
The Award was created as a celebration of the life of Danuta Gleed, a writer whose short fiction won several awards before her death in December 1996. Danuta Gleed’s first collection of short fiction, One of the Chosen, was posthumously published by BuschekBooks. The Award is made possible through a generous donation from John Gleed, in memory of his late wife, and is administered by The Writers’ Union of Canada.
Jury Comments on the Finalists for the 2025 Danuta Gleed Literary Award
Caitlin Galway, A Song for Wildcats (Rare Machines)
The five long-form stories in A Song for Wildcats take us through time and across continents, from a dingy motel in Las Vegas, to Northern Ireland, to the Australian wilderness, to a small town on the Hudson River, to the windswept coast of Corsica. Galway evokes these historical settings with careful attention to detail that transports readers viscerally into each world unfolding on the page. Galway’s characters grapple with ghosts, grief, and the pitfalls of love and loyalty, with particularly strong explorations of queer desire in “The Lyrebird’s Bell” and the titular “A Song for Wildcats.” At once ambitious and intimate, lyrical and precise, each story offers a profound journey of the heart.
Catherine Hunter, Seeing You Home (Signature Editions)
In these lushly detailed linked stories, Catherine Hunter explores with humour, depth, and warmth both the hardships and privilege of caring for a loved one at the end of life. As Clare navigates her husband’s terminal illness, the world they’ve shared comes into poignant relief, yet the things of that world — the books and keys and coffee cups and pencils — keep disappearing, seemingly lifting themselves into “the outer space of grief, where gravity is thin.” In simple, direct prose that sings when the moment calls, and through shifting points of view (including that even of a squirrel nesting in a discarded carpet), Hunter constructs a tender and uplifting portrait of loss.
Mikka Jacobsen, Good Victory (Freehand Books)
Set in in the vast malls and frenzied McDonaldlands of a conventional nineties upbringing, Good Victory blends nostalgia — the toys, the clothes, the music — with wry humour and a gothic sensibility reminiscent of Shirley Jackson. An isolated preteen who can’t stop choking herself, two young sisters deserted by their father at Disneyland, a lonely graduate student grieving the death of a lab rat: in these haunting, layered stories, Mikka Jacobsen probes the hidden fears of her characters with insight and compassion, shining a light on the darkness that prowls around the edges of suburban family life. This collection introduces an exciting new voice in Canadian short fiction.
Tracey Lindberg, The Cree Word for Love: Sâkihitowin (HarperAvenue)
Evocative and spectacular, The Cree Word for Love: Sâkihitowin transcends genre and form by celebrating and honouring the everlasting love at the core of Cree identity. Tracey Lindberg has crafted profound, authentic prose that serves as a generous heart from which flashes of poetry and the spectacular artwork of George Littlechild flourish in the pages in between. By presenting these stories through the four seasons, Lindberg honours the connection of love to the natural world around us, a bond valued by Indigenous cultures everywhere. This collection is not just a reclamation of Cree love in the aftermath of colonial traumas; it’s a proclamation of its resilience and timelessness.
Leila Marshy, My Thievery of the People (Baraka Books)
A fierce and dazzling debut, My Thievery of the People scrutinizes the legacies of colonialism and patriarchy with an unflinching eye to the damage wreaked on both oppressed and oppressor. Travelling between the Middle East and North America, and assuming a breath-taking array of fictional modes, from naturalism to surrealism to magic realism, these tightly crafted stories are remarkable for the alchemy of Leila Marshy’s prose, slipping from the ordinary to the menacing in the blink of a sentence, and the moral complexity of her vision. Nowhere is this more evident than in her exquisite folk tale “Not Blood,” which reimagines the 1948 Nakba from the perspective of a Jewish settler community haunted by its original thievery.
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The Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC) is the national organization of professionally published writers. TWUC was founded in 1973 to work with governments, publishers, booksellers, and readers to improve the conditions of Canadian writers. Now over 2,900 members strong, TWUC advocates on behalf of writers’ collective interests, and delivers value to members through advocacy, community, and information. TWUC believes in a thriving, diverse Canadian culture that values and supports writers.
For additional information:
Siobhan O’Connor, Chief Operating Officer
The Writers’ Union of Canada
soconnor@writersunion.ca
DATE: May 7, 2026
