Writers' Trust of Canada - 50 Years
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Recommended Reading

WT50 Reading List

Canadian authors share their must-read Canadian books 🍁

Writers’ Trust of Canada is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2026!

WT was founded in 1976 by writers Margaret Atwood, Pierre Berton, Graeme Gibson, Margaret Laurence, and David Young, with a goal to make Canada the best place in the world to be a writer. Fifty years later, the organization is Canada’s leading charity that advances, nurtures, and celebrates Canadian writers and writing.

Among the many special announcements and events slated for this exciting year is an ongoing video series featuring beloved Canadian authors across WT social platforms. Knowing that we are all eager to read more Canada, we asked writers to tell us about the books, authors, and experiences that shape them and our country.

From writers, to readers, these are their book recommendations.

#WT50

Prairie Edge

Elamin Abdelmahmoud

Author of Son of Elsewhere, CBC podcast and radio host.  

Book Recommendation

“Connor Kerr, he’s the best. Prairie Edge should do it. We’ve had the conversation in this country about the idea of land back, right? The idea of, what does it look like for land to be returned to Indigenous people. Well, what Connor is doing is playing this out a little bit through Edmonton. What if buffalo were back and they were going through dog parks in Edmonton?” 

The Good Eye

André Alexis

AndrĂ© Alexis won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in 2019 for his book Days by Moonlight. He won the same prize in 2015 for Fifteen Dogs and has been shortlisted twice.  

Book Recommendation

“A short story writer whose book I just read is Jess Gibson’s “The Good Eye.” The work is really amusing. You sort of go into darkness without realizing this is where the car is going. It’s a great ride  — it’s loo-dee-doo and then hell! 

Canadian writing is hugely influential on my imagination because I’m an immigrant. Naturally Norman Levine’s I Don’t Want to Know Anyone Too Well was super interesting. The Ottawa that he had lived through was vivid in his stories. It was the same with Margaret Laurence which to me was like super helpful because I felt alien. But those books made me feel less alien because they map out a terrain and you realize people have been here and they have felt these things and that, and I could work with that.” 

The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse

Jamaluddin Aram

Jamaluddin Aram was a 2020 finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in the short fiction category. His second book will be published this fall.

Book Recommendation

“The book that I think everyone should read is called The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse by Vinh Nguyen. This will tell you about the world that people leave behind to come to Canada and what that leaving behind means for their lives and their interactions with people.” 

Fifth Business

John Irving

Academy Award winner, internationally best-selling author, most recently of Queen Esther, and proud new Canadian.  

Book Recommendation 

“A teacher who knew my predisposition to the Victorian novel sent me Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business. Here was a living Dickensian. Here was a living Victorian. From that moment on, I became a devoted Robertson Davies reader. 

There have been a couple of much younger, newer Canadian writers whom I have enthusiastically endorsed. Nazanine Hozar, who wrote that wonderful novel Aria about the Iranian Revolution, and Kevin Hardcastle’s “Debris”, the MMA novel In the Cage, and County Road Six. Kevin is a is an old-fashioned storyteller of a very familiar and narrative kind to me.” 

The Valley of the Birdtail

Ann-Marie MacDonald

Award-winning playwright and author of Fall on your Knees, The Way the Crow Flies, Adult Onset, and Fayne.

Book Recommendation

“A Canadian book that I would assign to every high school English class or any class, is The Valley of the Birdtail. This book is a revelation. It has hard truths and it has such hope. 

There’s a poet whom I met at a literary festival, Jess Housty. I love her book Crushed Wild Mint. I love her poetry. 

So there’s a very slim volume which I return to and I’ve returned to since I was in my 20s. I just felt like, here’s somebody who gets it, who gets what writers are trying to do. And it is The Educated Imagination by Northrop Frye.”

The Deptford Trilogy

Grace O'Connell 

Grace O’Connell was a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award in 2008 in the category of short fiction. She is an editor and the author of Magnified World and Be Ready for the Lightning.  

Book Recommendation

“There was that great heyday with Mordecai Richler, Timothy Findley, people who were writing books that were really audacious and really entertaining. Robertson Davies’ The Deptford Trilogy. I will drone on about to anybody who lets me talk long enough.”

Autobiography of Red

Anthony Oliveira  

Anthony Oliveira’s debut book, Dayspring, won the 2024 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers. 

Book Recommendation

“The book that, like, cracked my brain open was Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. It is a retelling of a Hercules myth. It’s a queer love story. And I would kill to have been the one to write it.” 

The Handmaid’s Tale

Nita Prose

Internationally best-selling author of The Maid and The Mystery Guest. 

Book Recommendation

“I think one of the very most important Canadian books in our cannon is The Handmaid’s Tale. Now, this is a book that was published in 1985 and it remains as relevant when it was published as it is today. In fact, I think more so today. It is more cautionary and more prescient. 

 

There is a book that I’m really so excited for Canadians to read and it is called Wild People Quiet by Tara Gereaux. This is a novel about belonging, about identity, filial belonging, and what that means as well, and I think readers are really going to respond to this book.”

How Should a Person Be

Susan Swan

Author of eight books, including The Wives of Bath Susan Swan co-founded the Carol Shields Award and is a member of the Order of Canada for her contributions to Canadian literature. 

Book Recommendation 

“How Should a Person Be by Sheila Heti remains a classic with us. It asks a good question that most of us try to answer. She thought of Flaubert’s rules when she was writing it and everything he said about having specific, detailed emotions, she was determined to break it. And yet you would think that would mean that she wrote a sort of general pat. But no, it’s, it’s very personal and quite riveting.” 

A Complicated Kindness

Jane Urquhart 

Jane Urquhart is internationally acclaimed and beloved by Canadian readers. She is an Officer of the Order of Canada and she has won many prestigious literary awards. 

Book Recommendation 

“A Complicated Kindness and All my Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Fifteen Dogs by AndrĂ© Alexis, Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese, and Island: The Collected Stories by Alistair Macleod.” 

Her First Palestinian

Anuja Varghese

Anuja Varghese’s debut short story collection, Chrysalis, won the 2023 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers. Varghese his also a Writers’ Trust supporter.  

Book Recommendation

“Saeed Teebi’s writing, the short story collection Her First Palestinian and his new book You Will Not Kill Our Imagination. When the world is bleak on so many fronts, writers are uniquely positioned to imagine and articulate a better, more kind and more just world. I think Saeed’s work really does that and I would encourage everyone going to pick those up.”

Indian School Days

Jesse Wente

Jesse Wente’s book, Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance, was featured in the 2021 WT Amplified Voices campaign, which promotes published work of BIPOC and/or LGBTQ2S+ Canadian authors. 

About the Book

“The Canadian book that probably had the most influence on me as a writer is Indian School Days by Basil Johnston. Basil was a Anishinaabe writer and so this book is about his time in residential school. And it’s the first book, maybe the only book that I’ve read that’s literally about the experience that kids had at the schools my family attended. You know, when I look through these names — Noganosh, Manitouwabing — these are family names that I know, I have an uncle, Art Solomon — there’s a Solomon in here. It’s one of those things where it connected me to my family and my community in a way that no other Canadian book did, no other book I’ve read. So this book is like a treasure to me.”Â