Established in 1976, the First Novel Award program has launched the careers of some of Canada’s most beloved novelists. Previous winners include Michael Ondaatje, Joan Barfoot, Joy Kogawa, W. P. Kinsella, Nino Ricci, Rohinton Mistry, Michael Redhill, Mona Awad, Katherena Vermette, Casey Plett, Michelle Good, and last year’s winner, Alicia Elliott.
The winner of the Adult Novel Category will receive $60,000, and the five finalists will each receive $6,000 in prize money. The Youth Short Story Category invites authors between the ages of thirteen and seventeen to submit a short story under 3,000 words. The winner in this category will receive $5,000 and the five finalists will each receive $500.
2025 Special Guest Speaker
Mona Awad is the bestselling author of the novels Rouge, All’s Well, Bunny, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl. A three-time Goodreads Choice Award finalist, she won the 2016 Amazon Best First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Bunny was a finalist for a New England Book Award and was named a Best Book of 2019 by Time, Vogue, and the New York Public Library. It is currently being developed for film with Bad Robot Productions. Rouge is being adapted for film by Fremantle and Sinestra. Margaret Atwood named Awad her “literary heir” in The New York Times’s T Magazine. She teaches fiction in the creative writing program at Syracuse University and is based in Boston. Her next novel, We Love You, Bunny, will be released in September.
2025 Judging Panel
Jean Marc Ah-Sen
Jean-Marc Ah-Sen is the author of Grand Menteur, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation, and Kilworthy Tanner. His work has appeared in Literary Hub, Maclean’s, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and other publications.
Liz Harmer
Liz Harmer is the author of the novels The Amateurs (2018), finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award, and Strange Loops (2023). Her award-winning stories, essays, and poems have been published in Hazlitt, The Walrus, Image Journal, the Globe and Mail, the Malahat Review, the New Quarterly, Lit Hub, Best Canadian Stories, and elsewhere.
Chelene Knight
Chelene Knight is the author of five books including Safekeeping: A Writer’s Guided Journal For Launching a Book With Love (Anansi 2025), and Let It Go: Free Yourself From Old Beliefs and Find a New Path To Joy (HarperCollins Canada 2024). She is founder of her own creative studio, Breathing Space Creative through which she’s launched the Thrive Coaching Program where busy creatives can learn how personal development creates the mindset needed to better manage their energy and make space for all the things they are passionate about.
Shani Mootoo
Shani Mootoo was born in Ireland, raised in Trinidad, and has lived in Canada for over forty years. She is the author of several novels, including Polar Vortex and Cereus Blooms at Night, which is now a Penguin Modern Classic and a Vintage Classics book. Her work has been longlisted and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Giller Prize, the Lambda Literary Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, among others. Her poetry collections include Oh Witness Dey!, Cane | Fire, and The Predicament of Or.She has been awarded the Doctor of Letters honoris causa degree from Western University, is a recipient of Lambda Literary’s James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award, and The National Library’s Library and Archives Scholar Award. She lives in Southern Ontario, Canada.
Past Shortlists and Winners
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Mona Awad is the bestselling author of the novels Rouge, All’s Well, Bunny, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl. A three-time Goodreads Choice Award finalist, she won the 2016 Amazon Best First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Bunny was a finalist for a New England Book Award and was named a Best Book of 2019 by Time, Vogue, and the New York Public Library. It is currently being developed for film with Bad Robot Productions. Rouge is being adapted for film by Fremantle and Sinestra. Margaret Atwood named Awad her “literary heir” in The New York Times’s T Magazine. She teaches fiction in the creative writing program at Syracuse University and is based in Boston. Her next novel, We Love You, Bunny, will be released in September.
