Maria Reva won the 2018 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for her short story The Ermine Coat.

The $10,000 prize, which alternates between poetry and short story each year, recognizes writers under 35 of age who have yet to publish a book.

The jury panel of Martha Baillie, Omar El Akkad and Ayelet Tsabari read 171 anonymous works of short fiction, before selecting the three finalists and eventual winner.

"The Ermine Coat is a deeply moving story of a family," the jury said in a statement. "With elegant, nuanced prose, brimming with beauty and tenderness, Maria Reva sheds light on the social and economic pressures of Soviet life and reveals the joys and fragilities of familial love, and the sacrifices we make for it."

Reva was born in Ukraine, raised in Vancouver and is now a fiction fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.

The other finalists were Sarah Christina Brown for Kingdom Come and Khalida Hassan for Adjacent Rooms.

The prize was created by the Writers' Trust of Canada to help up-and-coming writers make the leap from emerging to established.

Past winners of the prize include Michael Crummey, Alison Pick and Alissa York.