Up-and-coming writer Pasha Malla has nabbed Ontario's Trillium Book Award for his debut collection of short fiction, organizers of the 22nd edition of the prize announced in Toronto on Tuesday.

Malla's The Withdrawal Method — a collection of contemporary tales exploring a variety of subjects — picked up the $20,000 English-language fiction honour, besting such competitors as Nino Ricci's acclaimed novel Origin of Species.

Malla began writing the stories of The Withdrawal Method while a graduate student at Concordia University in Montreal and says it took about six years to write.

"When I was writing this book I wanted it to be about topics that are not getting written about in Canada," he told CBC News.

He avoided subjects such as cancer or dealing with death that arise so frequently in contemporary short fiction, going instead for humour and unlikely situations.

"There were all these topics that short fiction was about and I thought I had maybe something different to say and a different way of saying it than was already happening," he said. "I was trying to assert my own vision and the way I see the world through these stories."

The Trillium caps a winning season for St. John's-born, London, Ont.-raised Malla. The Withdrawal Method also won the Writers' Union of Canada's Danuta Gleed Literary Award, while his short story Filmsong picked up an Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada earlier this month.

Malla said he's benefited from a cohort of strong short fiction writers, including Neil Smith, Lee Henderson and Jaspreet Singh, that have recently emerged on the Canadian scene.

"Canada produces amazing short fiction writers.… There's a lot of good collections coming out. I think I'm just lucky in that I'm riding a wave of people, young people particularly, that are putting out short fiction collections," he said.

Malla, who now divides his time between London, Toronto and New York, is working on his first novel. He is also a freelance journalist who has contributed to CBCNews.ca/arts.

Veteran writer and editor Marguerite Andersen snagged the corresponding $20,000 French-language Trillium Book Award for her Le Figuier sur le toit, a novel about about an elderly woman contemplating her life, including the rise of Nazism in Germany and the country's devastation after the Second World War.

Another debut work garnered the $10,000 Trillium Book Award for Poetry: Ontario writer Jeramy Dodds won for his first poetry collection, Crabwise to the Hounds. Dodds is now based in Fredericton.

Author and high school teacher Paul Prud'Homme won the $10,000 Trillium Book Award for Children's Literature for Les Rebuts: Hockey 2, about a motley crew of hockey "rejects" who decide to form their own team after being passed over.

The prize alternates each year between an English and French-language winner.

Established in 1987, the Trillium Book Award celebrates literary excellence by Ontario writers. It joined with the francophone equivalent, the Prix Trillium, in 1994.

The prize, which has been won by the likes of Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje and Wayson Choy, is administered by the Ontario Media Development Corporation on behalf of the Ontario Ministry of Culture.