JUNE 2026: Leila Marshy’s collection of short stories, My Thievery of the People has won the Writers’ Union of Canada Danuta Gleed Literary Award.

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.”