This award celebrates SCS learners writing outstanding fiction.
The finalists of the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies Pal Saqi Award for Fiction have been announced. Established by author and SCS learner Rajinderpal S. Pal, and named in honour of his father, the Pal Saqi Award for Fiction provides $2000 annually to a Creative Writing Certificate learner with the most outstanding final project. The award’s recipients are selected by a panel of Canadian publishing industry professionals.
This year’s Pal Saqi Award for Fiction finalists are:
Sarah Campbell is a writer in Waterloo where she also works at Words Worth Books. She has been published in The New Quarterly and The Quarantine Review. Recently, she finished her writing certificate at the University of Toronto, School of Continuing Studies. She lives with her husband, their two sons and two dogs and reads all the time.
The connected stories in Campbell’s collection, Time the Adults Did Something, focus on a group of teenage girls in the nineteen-nineties surviving a predatory teacher without the help of the women they should be able to rely on the most. She uses magical realism and humour to explore coming-of-age themes of loneliness and heartache to create a world of loss but also hope and joy.
Jury Citation: Sarah Campbell’s connected stories are searing and wise, painfully human and deeply real. With a deft hand and a natural storyteller’s gift, she forces readers to confront the unspoken, the uncomfortable, and the unimaginable. Campbell's audacious use of magic realism and her perfectly timed dark humour mark Time the Adults Did Something as a truly courageous and powerful collection from a writer of exceptional promise.
Berhane Bein Sertu was born in Eritrea. He fled to Sudan as an adolescent and moved to Canada in 1992. He holds a Master’s degree in Education and is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at SCS.
Bein Sertu’s Linked Story collection Darkness Without Dawn explores the tumultuous lives of characters who are always on the move and in resistance, mirroring the instability caused by a drawn-out conflict. At times funny and at times dark, the interconnected stories offer haunting metaphors for Eritrean life—angst, instability, longing, loss, danger, betrayal, resilience, and the unfulfilled yearnings of a people.
Jury Citation: In Darkness Without Dawn, Berhane Bein Sertu weaves a stunning tapestry of colonial violence and impossible choices. Richly rendered and evocative, the linked collection examines gender, race, identity, and connection across continents and cultures. In Sertu’s sure hands, these moving stories engage deeply with questions of language and naming—how proverbs, slang, and the words we inherit shape who we are—tracing the singular story of one man caught up in the impossible tides of history.
Kat Shermack is a writer based in Toronto. Her writing has been featured in The Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, and Today's Parent. In 2015 she was nominated as one of Canada’s Best New Magazine Writers by the National Magazine Awards, and in 2022, her fiction work made CBC's Short Story Contest long list.
Set in Toronto during the Covid-19 pandemic, Existential Succulent is about a journalist turned click-bait writer determined to fulfill her life’s ambition of writing a novel. Unfulfilled with her career and drowning in debt, Lillian is counting on an advance from a book deal to ease her millennial malaise and save her finances. But as the pandemic drags on, her writing is going nowhere, her debt continues to grow, and her mental health deteriorates. In isolation from the rest of the world, Lillian has no choice but to face who she really is, and starts to realize she may be more Trisha Paytas than Margaret Atwood. If she doesn’t get this book deal soon, she may face the ultimate indignity: moving back in with her mom.
Jury citation: Cheeky, timely, and at times perfectly unhinged, Kat Shermack’s Existential Succulent is both a delight to read and a preview of a writer with great control and natural wit. Populated by Type-A oddballs, try-hards, burnouts, and wannabes, this is a slyly funny sendup of Gen-Z malaise, social media’s destructive effects, and the deeper longings that connect us beneath it all. Tightly written in razor-sharp prose, Shermack grounds her characters—likable and maddening alike—in moments of authentic humanity, even amidst the laughs.
Thanks to this year’s jury, comprised of Grace O’Connell, Assistant Editor, Simon & Schuster Canada; Hazel Millar, Co-publisher, Book*hug Press; and Douglas Richmond, Editorial Director, House of Anansi Press.