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December 14, 2016Madeleine Thien on Language, Music, and Asking the Unaskable
2016 has been Madeleine Thien's year. It's not often that the world of writing and publishing can agree so enthusiastically on a writer's achievements, but Thien's breathtaking Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Knopf ...
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November 08, 2016Madeleine Thien Tops Year of Honours with Scotiabank Giller Prize
Every once in a while a book comes along that captures readers' and juries' imaginations so completely that it becomes the book of that year. After last night, it's impossible to deny that 2016 belongs ...
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April 30, 2026Maggie Helwig wins 2026 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing
The Writers’ Trust of Canada has named Maggie Helwig the winner of the 2026 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for her book Encampment. The prize, presented at the annual Politics and the ...
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July 16, 2018
Make It New (Again)!
I was shocked a few years ago when, in a workshop I attended, a thirty-something writer who had already published a book (and has since gone on to publish two much more successful ones) dismissed the ...
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March 25, 2020Making Time: Blueprinting, or How Durga Chew-Bose Showed Me the Kinship Between Music and Writing
On the first day of social distancing due to COVID-19, I woke up with my synthesizer beside me. I sat up in bed and stabbed some keys for an hour, fed it into my laptop, put it all aside, and returned ...
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May 05, 2020Making Time: Finding Healing with Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama. You know her. You took a selfie in the Infinity Mirror Room at the AGO. You’ve seen her polka dots all over the Internet. You’ve seen her sobering gaze, her blunt bob.On April 15, Kusama ...
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February 27, 2020Making Time: How Ondaatje Taught Me To Show Up For Myself, or Plotting vs. Pantsing
There are some books whose images stay with us long after we’ve read them, far more than the stories or the characters themselves. An image that has stayed with me over the years is from The English ...
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January 24, 2020Making Time: Making Randomness & #SSCLUB
When 2020 began, I’d been off most social media for about twenty-two days. My decision wasn’t deliberate. In fact, it was reactive. The night before I went offline, I read a short story: “Innards” ...
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May 29, 2020Making Time: Why Now is the Perfect Time for Tarot
I don’t want to pretend that I know the history of the Tarot or how it should be used, but I’ve been using it for the last three years because it’s been immensely helpful. I’m not an “expert,” ...
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July 31, 2023Managing a Writing Career and Mental Illness
As someone who's dealt with chronic depression and anxiety for most of my life, I know how difficult it can be to balance mental illness and writing. Sometimes, the thought of working on my latest book ...