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Writers’ Trust Fellowship

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Fellowship

Winner $50, 000

Eligibility Criteria

  • Canadian citizen or permanent resident
  • No age criterion
  • Professional writer with a strong publishing track record

Nomination Deadline

March 19, 2019

About the Fellowship

Regarded as one of most distinguished accolades presented by Canada’s literary community, the Writers’ Trust Fellowship grants recipients inclusion amongst a select group of our country’s finest authors. 

The Fellowship annually rewards one writer $50,000 for demonstrating exceptional creative ability and outstanding promise in their publications to date. The Fellowship is intended to draw attention to a writer’s past work and to stimulate interest in their future work, but, most importantly, it is meant to provide recipients a window in which they can work on their next book with as much creative freedom as possible.

Fellows are invited to attend a two-week, self-directed residency at the Leighton Artists’ Colony at The Banff Centre in Alberta.

Writers who have a strong publishing track record in the categories of fiction, literary nonfiction, poetry, or literature for young people are eligible. The Writers' Trust is currently accepting 2019 Fellowship nominations. View the prize guidelines and fill out the online form to make a nomination.

2018 Winner

Charles
Foran

Jury Citation

"The range, depth, and beauty of Charles Foran’s work is an astounding feat. Few authors in Canada or the world write as eloquently or expertly about literary lions and hockey legends; about the Irish Troubles and post-Tiananmen Square China; about lives caught in the public gaze of history or in their most intimate encounters.  In a body of work that spans the tail end of one century and the beginning of another, he’s proven just as adventurous in his choices of genre — moving in and out of fiction, literary nonfiction, journalism, biography, criticism, and advocacy for freedom of speech and diverse societies. The Writers’ Trust salutes and welcomes to its fellowship an indispensable voice in Canadian literature, a masterful storyteller who has helped us understand ourselves and the world around us one book, one essay, one campaign, at a time. " — 2018 Writers’ Trust Fellowship Jury

Author Page

About Charles Foran

The range, depth, and beauty of Charles Foran’s work is an astounding feat.

Charlie Foran was born and raised in Toronto. He has published 11 books, among them the multiple-award winning biography of Mordecai Richler, Mordecai: The Life & Times, a collection of travel and literary essays, Join the Revolution, Comrade, the novel Planet Lolita, which explores the disquiet of the digital age in Asia, and The Last House of Ulster, a unique account of the volatile world of Northern Ireland as told through the portrait of one family. For his fiction, nonfiction, and journalism, Foran has won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Charles Taylor Prize, a Governor General’s Literary Award, a Canadian Jewish Book Award, two QSPELL prizes, and several National Magazine Awards. He holds degrees from the University of Toronto and the University College, Dublin, and has taught in China, Hong Kong, and Canada. Foran has also made radio documentaries for the CBC program Ideas and co-wrote the Gemini-winning TV documentary Mordecai Richler: The Last of the Wild Jews. A past president of PEN Canada, he is a senior fellow at Massey College, and an adjunct professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. In 2014 he was named to the Order of Canada. Charlie Foran recently stepped down as head of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship, a national organization committed to advancing understandings of citizenship and inclusion in the 21st century, to devote himself more fully to his writing. He lives in Toronto with his family.

Selected Works

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