Announcing the 2025 Marina Nemat Award Winners

Poetry: Kathe Gray
Car Radio At Night Nearly Home

Kathe Gray is a doctoral candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University in Toronto. She holds a certificate in creative writing from the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies, where she was the 2021 recipient of the Penguin Random House of Canada Student Fiction award. Her creative writing has appeared in Carousel, Great Lakes Review, Room, and Versal, and on stage at the Toronto Fringe Festival. She and her family live on the treaty lands and territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit in Guelph, Ontario.

Car Radio At Night Nearly Home tunes into the quiet frequencies of everyday life—absence, memory, and tenderness—flickering between voices, moods, and landscapes. This collection hums with grit, longing, and the uncanny shimmer of the ordinary.

The jury shared the following about Gray’s collection: “With incisive imagery, tenderness, and a wide-ranging sensibility, Kathe Gray’s poetry collection, Car Radio at Night Nearly Home, introduces readers to an original new talent. Gray's lines are keenly measured; her poetics both subtle and highly evolved. It's poetry that at once surprises with its insight (‘you're a boxcar’) and makes perfect sense of an imperfect world: ‘Cirrus sky, a contrail, trace of a traveller gone.’”
 

Fantasy: Maude Abouche 
Where Spider Lilies Bloom

Maude Abouche, writing as Madi Haab, is a queer and neurodivergent writer of Moroccan descent from Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. She has lived and studied in Japan, and draws inspiration from her mixed cultural heritage and identities to explore the liminal and interstitial. Her work has received honourable mentions from the 2023 Penguin Random House Student Award for Fiction and 2024 Janice Colbert Poetry Award, and has appeared in Augur Magazine, Haven Speculative, and more. 

Where Spider Lilies Bloom: After a nasty breakup leaves her stranded in the Japanese countryside, Montrealer-turned-Tokyoite Lily has an ill-advised hookup with a mysterious stranger named Tadao in an abandoned temple. Unable to put him out of her mind, she returns to the temple to look for him, but slips into a liminal realm during her search and ends up in feudal Japan. There she crosses his path again, defying time itself. Faced with betrayal, revenge, and the very real ghosts of the samurai family they’re both bound to protect, Lily and Tadao try to make sense of their fateful bond, while their choices not only affect their present, but ripple across centuries.

The jury shared the following: “From the first pages of Where the Spider Lilies Bloom I knew I was in the hands of a confident and gifted craftsperson—the dialogue (internal and external) is sharp and energetic, the characters beautifully drawn and alive on the page, and the setting/world building rich and atmospheric. The emotional connection is strong from the start, and it was painful to leave these people behind, I was already so invested in their lives! Not to mention the very intriguing storylines that have been so elegantly set in motion.”