Shashi Bhat and Minelle Mahtani win 2025 BC and Yukon Book Prizes
2025 ethel wilson fiction prize: death by a thousand cuts by shashi bhat
A breathtaking and sharply funny collection about the everyday trials and impossible expectations that come with being a woman, from the Governor General’s Literary Award-shortlisted author of The Most Precious Substance on Earth.
What would have happened if she’d met him at a different time in her life, when she was older, more confident, less lonely, and less afraid? She wonders not whether they would have stayed together, but whether she would have known to stay away.
A writer discovers that her ex has published a novel about their breakup. An immunocompromised woman falls in love, only to have her body betray her. After her boyfriend makes an insensitive comment, a college student finds an experimental procedure that promises to turn her brown eyes blue. A Reddit post about a man’s habit of grabbing his girlfriend’s breasts prompts a shocking confession. An unsettling second date leads to the testing of boundaries. And when a woman begins to lose her hair, she embarks on an increasingly nightmarish search for answers.
With honesty, tenderness, and a skewering wit, these stories boldly wrestle with rage, longing, illness, and bodily autonomy, and their inescapable impacts on a woman’s relationships with others and with herself.
2025 HUBERT EVANS NON-FICTION PRIZE: MAY IT HAVE A HAPPY ENDING BY MINELLE MAHTANI
A searing, intimate and blisteringly honest memoir about mothers and daughters, grief and healing, and finding your voice.
Minelle Mahtani had taken a leap of faith. A new mother in a new life, she’d moved across the country for love, and soon found herself facing the exciting and terrifying prospect of hosting her own radio show. But as she began to find her place in the majority white newsroom, she was handed devastating news: her Iranian mother had been diagnosed with tongue cancer.
Just as Minelle was finding her voice, her mother was losing hers.
What does it mean to amplify the voices of others while the stories of your ancestors are being buried in your mother’s mouth? Why do we cling to superstition and luck when we’ve lost all faith in healing those we love? And how do we juggle bearing the burden of looking after an ill parent when we are trying to parent our own children?
In exquisitely lyrical and inventive prose, Mahtani recounts the experience so many of us recognize: a life calibrated through calculating when to speak and when to be silent in a world that feels like it forces us to be broken.