Leslie Jamison (Beowulf Sheehan)

American author and essayist Leslie Jamison has been named the winner of the 2025 Weston International Award.

The $75,000 award, administered by the Writers’ Trust of Canada, honours an international author for their career achievement in literary nonfiction.

Jamison is the author of four works of nonfiction, including the essay collections The Empathy Exams and Make It Scream, Make It Burn, and two memoirs, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath and her most recent work, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story.

In their citation, the jury wrote that Jamison brings a “mastery of language to subjects that often lack words: addiction, motherhood, divorce, the writing life.”

“Through evocative, compelling and immersive storytelling, leavened by self-deprecating humour and tenderness, the author transports us into her world — with all its longings and awakenings,” the jury wrote. “She has the rare gift of being able to fuse her most intimate thoughts with insights gleaned from rigorous scholarship in the social sciences and history. If nonfiction at its best pursues both truth and beauty, this author demonstrates the art of writing out of our lives at the highest level.”

Jamison, who also recently completed Peggy, the posthumous novel begun by her friend and Canadian novelist Rebecca Godfrey, was selected as the recipient of this year’s award in a two-stage process: a three-person international advisory committee creates a confidential longlist, and a five-member Canadian jury selects the winner. This year’s international committee was comprised of U.K. broadcaster and columnist Mariella Frostrup, novelist and author Pico Iyer, American author and editor Sam Tanenhaus, former editor of the New York Times Book Review.

The Canadian jury for this year’s award was comprised of Carmen Aguirre, Jeet Heer, Marni Jackson, Benjamin Perrin, and Michelle Porter.

Jamison is the third writer to win the Weston International Award, which was announced in 2023 as part of a funding commitment from the Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation, which also supports the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Pankaj Mishra won last year’s award, and British writer Robert Macfarlane was its inaugural winner.

Jamison will appear in conversation with a Canadian writer at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto on September 15.