WINNER! Danuta Gleed Literary Award

Absolutely thrilled to have won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award from The Writers' Union of Canada. it was an impressive shortlist and I honestly was not expecting this. I had to sit on the information for just under a week until the formal announcememt, which was done as an Instagram Live event. And keeping secrets is absolutely NOT my forte.

To celebrate, had a lovely dinner with the Fam Four gang, including Lee Lai who is hot off several awards and high profile noms. Cannon is brilliant, please read it. As for me, I'm still reeling from what the judges said about the book. Never did I expect such high praise. >> Of Leila Marshy’s book My Thievery of the People (Baraka Books), jury members Lisa Alward, Waubgeshig Rice, and Anuja Varghese, said:

“A fierce and dazzling debut, My Thievery of the People scrutinizes the legacies of colonialism and patriarchy with an unflinching eye to the damage wreaked on both oppressed and oppressor. Travelling between the Middle East and North America, and assuming a breath-taking array of fictional modes, from naturalism to surrealism to magic realism, these tightly crafted stories are remarkable for the alchemy of Leila Marshy’s prose, slipping from the ordinary to the menacing in the blink of a sentence, and the moral complexity of her vision. Nowhere is this more evident than in her exquisite folk tale “Not Blood,” which reimagines the 1948 Nakba from the perspective of a Jewish settler community haunted by its original thievery.” <<

Here's the video!