TORONTO — Sheung-King and Martha Baillie were among the big winners at the Writers' Trust Awards ceremony Tuesday that saw many take the podium with emotional pleas to protect LGBTQ rights and end the war in Gaza.
Sheung-King claimed the $60,000 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for “Batshit Seven,” a novel about a detached millennial living through the protests in Hong Kong, with the jury praising the Richmond, B.C.- and Hong Kong-based writer's work as "darkly hilarious, and stunningly original."
Sheung-King is the pen name for Aaron Tang, who took the stage amid loud hoots and applause from a group of friends and family. The Writers' Trust handed out seven awards and $330,000 in prize money at the event.
Like many who took the stage Tuesday, Sheung-King used his platform to acknowledge ongoing political turmoil, saying that in times of global crisis and war, "humanity diminishes" and "we turn to writing for clarity."
"Writing is not about settling — it is about imagining for a better future. So I want to say thank you to all my fellow artists and writers here who are writing and continue to write against state violence, to write against borders, write against war, write against genocide, to write so that we can have a better future," said Sheung-King.
"Finally I would like to say, free Palestine and ceasefire now."
Calls to end the war in Gaza or support Palestinian people were a common refrain at the literary bash, with fellow winner Madeleine Thien — who won the $25,000 Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award for a body of work the jury called "masterful" — announcing she would donate the entirety of her prize to three causes: the Woodcock Fund, which supports professional writers in financial difficulty, the Palestine Children's Relief Fund and the Lebanese Red Cross.
Thien said that after teaching for the past seven years, she has saved enough money to fully support a career as a full-time writer, and left teaching in June.
"Therefore this beautiful prize has given me another kind of gift, the ability to return the prize money to the world in ways that my own resources would not have allowed," she said.
Baillie, of Toronto, took home the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction for her family memoir "There Is No Blue," a collection of three essays the jury said "rattles the bones of what it is to be in imperfect relationships with the people we are tied to by birth and blood.”
Earlier in the night, Anthony Oliveira was awarded $12,000 for the LGBTQ2S+ emerging writers prize for the queer love story "Dayspring."
“This is a moment when a curtain is descending and a chill is already starting to be felt," Oliveira said in his speech. "I have a unique chance in this room to address the publishing industry. And we all need to stand up. We all need to be loud. We all need to not comply in advance.”
In addition to Thien, three other writers received career prizes for their contributions to Canadian literature: playwright Marie Clements was awarded the $40,000 Matt Cohen Award, an increase from $25,000 that was announced onstage; Sara O’Leary took home the $25,000 Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People; and Rita Wong, who was not at the ceremony but was awarded the $60,000 Latner Griffin Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize.
The ceremony came on the heels of Monday's Giller gala, which awarded its $100,000 prize to Toronto poet-novelist Anne Michaels, for her novel “Held."
At the Giller ceremony, Michaels appealed for “unity” in Canada's arts community as protesters gathered outside the gala to chant slogans and wave banners in a boycott over sponsors with ties to Israel, including Scotiabank because of its stake in Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems.
The Writers' Trust has not drawn such attention, despite several large corporate benefactors listed on its website, including Scotiabank.
Michael Deforge, a spokesperson for the protest group CanLit Responds, which has also targeted Hot Docs and the Scotiabank Photography Award as part of its No Arms in the Arts campaign, says the Giller boycott is the culmination of a yearlong process during which the group felt its concerns weren't being heard.
Deforge, a comics artist and illustrator, also points to Scotiabank as being the Giller's premier sponsor while having a much larger stake in Elbit Systems than Canada's other major banks, as outlined in a recent Globe and Mail story reviewing securities filings and investment fund performance.
"The goal of a boycott isn't to achieve some sort of moral purity, but to identify targets in our industry where we have the most leverage," Deforge said in an email.
Writers' Trust fiction finalists Conor Kerr and Éric Chacour made the long list for the Giller Prize, while Canisia Lubrin, Fawn Parker and Sheung-King withdrew their names from Giller consideration.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 19, 2024.
Cassandra Szklarski, The Canadian Press
