Award History
Jury Citation
"Samantha Jade Macpherson’s 'The Fish and the Dragons' is an idyllic traversal of emigration, diaspora, and the fraught lineage of a family living under conditions of immense poverty both in China and Canada. Brimming with majesty, this story truly exemplifies a writer coming into her own voice through a precise style that lends itself to branding images onto your psyche, and which braids the ancestral with the contemporary. Never once losing pace, Macpherson’s story proves that culture and traditions exhibit worlds gushing with what you may call magic realism, but is naturalized in such a way that we are made aware that such splendour is in fact real. "
—2019 Journey Prize Jury Carleigh Baker, Catherine Hernandez, and Joshua Whitehead