CBC Books' writers to watch: 30 Canadian writers making their mark in 2024
CBC Books has announced this year's writers to watch list! Here are 30 Canadian writers on the rise in 2024.
Vincent Anioke
Vincent Anioke is a Nigerian-Canadian software engineer. His short stories have appeared in The Ex-Puritan, The Rumpus, The Masters Review, Carve Magazine and Passages North. He won the 2021 Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence and has been shortlisted for multiple contests, including the 2023 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
His story Utopia was longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize twice, in 2021 and 2023. His story Leave A Funny Message At The Beep was longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize in 2024. His debut short story collection, Perfect Little Angels, was also released in April 2024.
Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio
Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio is a Filipina-Canadian author, speaker and school board consultant who builds bridges between educators and Filipino families. She was the runner-up in the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award recognizing Asian authors in the Canadian Diaspora. Austria-Bonifacio was on the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize longlist.
Austria-Bonifacio's debut linked story collection, Reuniting with Strangers, explores feelings of displacement and estrangement caused as a result of migrating to Canada seeking opportunity.
Frankie Barnet
Frankie Barnet is a Montreal-based author touted for her story collection An Indoor Kind of Girl and graphic literary work Kim: A Novel Idea. She has an MFA from Syracuse University and her fiction has been published in places such as Joyland, Event Magazine, PRISM International, Washington Square Review, and the Best Canadian Stories anthology of both 2016 and 2019.
In Frankie Barnet's 2024 novel Mood Swings, the concept of "normal" is examined as animals besiege cities all around the world, fed up with the mistreatment of the environment.
Kate Black
Kate Black is a Vancouver-based writer whose essays have been published in Maisonneuve, The Walrus and The Globe and Mail. She was named one of Canada's top emerging voices in nonfiction by the 2020 National Magazine Awards and RBC Taylor Prize.
In her 2024 nonfiction work Big Mall, Kate Black examines the history of shopping and its place in capitalist structure. As places of pleasure, memory and pain, she pays particular attention to West Edmonton Mall — North America's largest mall where she spent a lot of time growing up.
Asha Ashanti Bromfield
Asha Ashanti Bromfield is a Black Canadian writer, actress, singer and producer from Toronto. She is best known for her role as Melody Valentine, drummer of Josie and the Pussycats in the television show Riverdale and as the Netflix show Locke & Key's Zadie Wells. The actress is also the author of the YA novel Hurricane Summer.
After learning of stories her parents lived through during a tumultuous time in Jamaica's history, Asha Ashanti Bromfield was inspired to write her newest novel, Songs of Irie. The historical coming-of-age YA novel is set amidst the Jamaican civil unrest of the 1970s.
Cassandra Calin
Cassandra Calin is an artist and popular webtoon cartoonist who has amassed over 2.5 million followers on social media. She was born in Romania and now lives in Montreal. The New Girl is her debut graphic novel.
Inspired by artist Cassandra Calin's own immigration story, The New Girl is a middle-grade graphic novel about Lia and her family's move to Canada from Romania. Alongside all the complicated feelings Lia has about moving to somewhere completely different from home, when she arrives, she experiences her first period.
Christina Cooke
Christina Cooke is a Jamaican Canadian writer based in New York City. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Caribbean Writer, Prairie Schooner and Epiphany: A Literary Journal. She has won the Writers' Trust M&S Journey Prize and Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. Broughtupsy is her debut novel.
In the novel Broughtupsy, the death of her brother brings Akúa home to Jamaica after a decade. There, she struggles to reconnect with her estranged sister while they spread his ashes and revisit landmarks of their shared childhood.
Therese Estacion
Therese Estacion is a writer and teacher from the Philippines who now lives in Toronto. In her debut poetry collection, Phantompains, Therese Estacion shows what it means to bear witness to one's own pain and sexuality, to find catharsis and self-love, after a rare infection stole her limbs but not her life.
In the work, Estacion takes her audience through the monotony of recovery and explores themes of disability, grief and life in a surrealist fashion.
Sarah Everett
Currently based in Alberta, Everett is the author of several books for teens. The Probability of Everything won the 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for young people's literature — text. Her YA and middle grade books include Some Other Now, How to Live Without You and No One Here is Lonely.
Her books explore identity, race and belonging. The award-winning The Probability of Everything follows Kemi Carter, an 11-year-old girl who dreams of being a scientist. With her love for probability, she calculates that an asteroid has a high probability of hitting the Earth in four days.
Erum Shazia Hasan
Erum Shazia Hasan Hasan is a Toronto-based writer and a sustainable development consultant for various UN agencies. We Meant Well, her debut novel, poses a difficult moral dilemma for its protagonist, Maya, an aid worker who must decide who to believe when her coworker at the orphanage, Marc, is accused of assaulting her former protégé, Lele.
Inspired by her many travels, Hasan's writing transcends borders, bringing diverse cultures to life on the page. We Meant Well was on the 2023 longlist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Scott Alexander Howard
Scott Alexander Howard is a Vancouver author. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard where his work focused on the relationship between memory, emotion, and literature. The Other Valley is his first novel.
The Other Valley follows the story of Odile Ozanne, who lives in a town with a magical valley. To the east, the town exists twenty years forward in time.
Cheryl Isaacs
Cheryl Isaacs is an Indigenous writer of the Kanyen'kéha tribe in Ontario. Her literary work has appeared in numerous Indigenous publications.
Her forthcoming YA novel The Unfinished is an exploration of Kanien'kéha culture by way of a speculative fiction tale of monsters, mystery, and secrets that refuse to stay submerged.
Ai Jiang
Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian author and poet. She was a finalist for the 2022 Nebula Award for Best Short Story. In 2023, she won the Ignyte Award for her poem, We Smoke Pollution. She is the author of Linghun, a ghostly tale of those who are still holding onto the land of the living and burdened in death by their grief, and I AM AI.
Her work has appeared in a wide variety of speculative venues including Interzone, Uncanny Magazine, The Dark Magazine, Pseudopod, Radon Journal, The Deadlands, Dark Matter, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Zilla Jones
Zilla Jones is an African-Canadian woman writing on Treaty 1 territory (Winnipeg). Her stories appear in Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, Prism International, The Fiddlehead, FreeFall Magazine, the Ex-Puritan, Room Magazine, Bayou Magazine and The Journey Prize Stories. In 2023, she was a Journey Prize winner and a finalist in the Writers' Trust RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers.
She has also won the Malahat Review Open Season Award, the Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction, the FreeFall short fiction award and placed second in the Prairie Fire and Austin Clarke contests. Her debut novel, The World So Wide, and a short fiction collection, So Much To Tell, are forthcoming with Cormorant Books in 2025 and 2026.
Jones previously made the 2020 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Our Father and has longlisted twice for her story How to Make a Friend, in 2022 and 2023, before shortlisting in 2024.
Amy Lea
Amy Lea is an Ottawa-based contemporary romance writer and Canadian bureaucrat. Her work centres on romantic comedies for adults and teens. Her previous novels include Woke Up Like This, which was on the Canada Reads 2024 longlist, Exes and O's and Set on You.
The final novel in Lea's Influencer trilogy, The Catch stars fashion influencer Melanie Karlsen whose influence is in need of a power boost.
Éloïse Marseille
Éloïse Marseille is an artist and illustrator from Montreal. Naked: Confessions of a Normal Woman is her first book. She holds a BA in Studio Art from Concordia University
Naked: Confessions of a Normal Woman is a candid and funny memoir that follows author Éloïse Marseille as she explores her sexuality and learns to live free of shame. Her work explores sexuality, gender and identity.
Matthew R. Morris
Matthew R. Morris is a writer, advocate and educator based in Toronto. As a public speaker, he has travelled across North America to educate on anti-racism in the education system. Black Boys Like Me is his first book. Morris was recently announced as one of the readers for the 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize.
Black Boys Like Me is a collection of eight essays that examine the experiences of Matthew R. Morris with race and identity throughout his childhood into his current work as an educator.
Premee Mohamed
Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction writer based in Edmonton. Her series Beneath the Rising received nominations for the Crawford Award, British Fantasy Awards, Locus Awards and Aurora Awards.
Her book The Annual Migration of Clouds won the 2022 Aurora Award for best novella. Her other books include The Butcher of the Forest, No One Will Come Back for Us and The Siege of Burning Grass, which was shortlisted for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for fiction.
Her latest, We Speak Through the Mountain is a sequel novella to the post-apocalyptic Albertan book The Annual Migration of Clouds.
Sadi Muktadir
Sadi Muktadir is a Toronto based writer and editor at Joyland Magazine. He was a finalist for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Literary Excellence, a finalist for the Malahat Review's Open Season Awards, a third-place winner of the Humber Literary Review's Emerging Writer Story Contest and a winner of Toronto's What's Your Story competition.
His 2024 debut novel Land of No Regrets follows Nabil's fast friendship with three other misfits and the chaos that ensues when they start pulling pranks and rebelling against the difficult and often violent teachers.
Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall
Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall is a writer of New Zealand and Coast Salish heritage who has lived in both New Zealand and British Columbia during her childhood. She won the 2020 Adam Foundation Prize and was runner-up in the 2021 Surrey Hotel-Newsroom writer's residency award.
Her breakout work Tauhou was shortlisted for the 2024 Amazon First Novel Award and examines Indigenous families, womanhood and reimagines post-colonial histories and futures. Set on alternate versions of Vancouver Island and Aotearoa New Zealand that, in this story, are located beside each other in the ocean, each chapter contains a poem, a short story and a form of memory.
Loghan Paylor
Loghan Paylor is an Ontario-born author currently based in Abbotsford, B.C. They have an MA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and their short fiction and essays have previously appeared in publications including Room and Prairie Fire. The Cure for Drowning, is their debut novel.
In The Cure for Drowning, Kit McNair was born Kathleen to an Irish farming family in Ontario and, a tomboy in boy's clothes, doesn't fit in with the expectations of a farmgirl set out for them.
Ashley Qilavaq-Savard
Ashley Qilavaq-Savard is an Inuk writer and artist from Iqaluit. She is the author of Where the Sea Kuniks the Land and I Am A Rock. Qilavaq-Savard also makes sealskin and beaded jewellery and studies Inuktitut.
In I Am A Rock, Pauloosie's pet rock, Miki Rock describes all that it can see, feel and hear as part of the land in the Arctic from the winds to the animals, the Northern lights and more.
Amanda Peters
Amanda Peters is a writer of Mi'kmaq and settler ancestry living in Annapolis Valley, N.S. Her debut novel The Berry Pickers won the Carnegie Medal of Excellence, was a finalist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was named one of CBC Books' best fiction books of the year. She is the winner of the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose and a participant in the 2021 Writers' Trust Rising Stars program.
Her forthcoming short story collection, Waiting for the Long Night Moon, draws from her own background to examine legacies of trauma and resilience.
Deepa Rajagopalan
Deepa Rajagopalan is an author based in Ontario. Born to Indian parents in Saudi Arabia, she has lived across India, the United States and Canada. Her previous writing has appeared in publications such as the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, the New Quarterly, Room and Arc. She was the 2021 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award winner.
The collection of stories in her debut story collection Peacocks of Instagram paint a tapestry of the Indian diaspora. Tales of revenge, love, desire and family explore the intense ramifications of privilege, or lack thereof.
Brandon Reid
Brandon Reid is a writer whose work has been published in the Barely South Review, the Richmond Review and The Province. He is a member of Heiltsuk First Nation, with a mix of Indigenous and English ancestry. He lives in Richmond, B.C. Beautiful Beautiful is his first book and is also a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
Beautiful Beautiful is a debut coming-of-age novel that explores the beauty of rural and urban landscapes, his relationship with masculinity and the task of reconciling an Indigenous and Western way of life.
Michael V. Smith
Michael V. Smith is a writer, filmmaker and professor of creative writing at University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus. His other books include his memoir, My Body Is Yours and the novel Bad Ideas. He currently lives in Kelowna, B.C.
Queers Like Me is an intimate poetry collection reflecting on the poet's experiences being queer in a small town. In two sections called You Queer and Family, the poet explores childhood, the connection between grandparent and grandchild and moving to the big city as a queer person.
Kailash Srinivasan
Kailash Srinivasan is an Indian-Canadian author living and working in Vancouver. His work explores themes of societal, economic, religious and political fractures, injustice and inequality. His prose and poetry have appeared in several literary magazines, including XRAY, Coachella Review, Selkie, Antilang, Oyster River Pages, Bad Nudes, Lunch Ticket, Midway Journal and others.
Srinivasan won the Writer's Union of Canada Short Prose Competition for Emerging Writers in 2024. His work has been shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize and Into the Void Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Bath Short Story Award. He was on the shortlist for the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize for his story The Baby. He previously made the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for an earlier version of The Baby. He's currently working on his debut novel.
Leanne Toshiko Simpson
Leanne Toshiko Simpson is a mixed-race Yonsei writer, educator and psychiatric survivor from Toronto. She lives with bipolar disorder while teaching at the University of Toronto. Simpson was named Scarborough, Ont.'s Emerging Writer in 2016 and was nominated for the Journey Prize in 2019.
Never Been Better is her first novel, which was inspired by the community she has found through her mental health advocacy work post-institutionalization.
Natalie Sue
Natalie Sue is a Calgary-based writer of Iranian and British descent. I Hope This Finds You Well is her debut novel.
A love of storytelling inspired the work, which follows an anxious admin for Supershops, Inc., as she navigates a workplace of unsatisfactory colleagues.
Christina Wong
Christina Wong is a Toronto writer, playwright and multidisciplinary artist who also works in sound installation, audio documentaries and photography. Her plays have been staged at various theatres including the Factory Studio, Passe Muraille Backspace and she has created journalism and documentary work for TOK Magazine, the Toronto Star and Met Radio.
Her illustrated work, Denison Avenue was co-written with illustrator Daniel Innes and championed by Naheed Nenshi on Canada Reads 2024. It was also a shortlisted finalist for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
