Aurora Stewart de Peña's JULIUS JULIUS shortlisted for the 2025 Atwood Gibson Fiction Prize

Jury Citation

“Listen to this: ‘Great advertising changes the way we see the world. Great advertising reflects culture, amplifying ideas that move us all forward.’ Julius Julius does exactly this, if for ‘advertising’ we read ‘literature:’ it changes how we see, it moves us forward. Fast-paced, strange, perky, and uncanny as the contemporary world, Stewart de Peña’s novel in individual paragraphs creates a knowing magic realist world, rife with the misogyny and surrealism of late-stage capitalism and its corporations. Yet at the same time, it reads with the irreverent and delightful self-awareness of a smart campaign.”—2025 Atwood Gibson Prize Jury (Gary Barwin, Ali Bryan, and Jasmine Sealy) 

About the Book

In the world’s oldest advertising agency, ghosts control the boardroom AC, an ancient executive assistant runs a cave full of thousand-year-old billboards, and there are bones in the walls. In a trio of voices from different time periods, we move through the mythical Agency, interrogating the process of stoking desire for a living. The novel reveals the cracks in the veneer of creative industries and the crisis of consciousness underneath. 

About Aurora Stewart de Peña

Aurora Stewart de Peña is a Toronto-based playwright and author. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Ex-Puritan, Little Brother, and Petal Journal, and she has contributed essays to Vice, Real Life Magazine, and The Globe and Mail. Her plays have been performed in Toronto at Buddies in Bad Times, Factory Theatre, and Harbourfront Centre, among other venues, and in New York, England, and Italy.