Maria Reva was named the winner of the 2026 Amazon Canada First Novel Award for her novel Endling.

The annual award, announced at an event in Toronto on June 4, recognizes the talent and contributions of debut Canadian novelists and comes with a $60,000 prize.

Endling is a darkly comic story that draws on Reva’s own experiences as a Ukrainian expat tracking her family’s delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines during the ongoing war in Ukraine.

The novel is a “trenchant eco-thriller with experimental touches,” wrote Quill & Quire reviewer Jean Marc Ah-Sen. “The book examines the ways regional conflicts render peacetime activities null and void, and how attempts to understand war in literature tend to fail in properly capturing the reality.”

Endling, published by Knopf Canada/Vintage Canada, previously won the 2025 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, was a finalist for the 2025 Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction, and was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Reva is author of a previous short story collection, Good Citizens Need Not Fear, which is set in Ukraine at the end of the Soviet era.

She was one of six writers shortlisted for the prize in May. The other finalists were Kate Cayley, Jon Claytor, Antonio Michael Downing, Kyle Edwards, and Ben Ladouceur. Each finalist receives $6,000

The first novel prize, first awarded in 1976, marks its 50th anniversary this year. Previous winners have included Michael Ondaatje, Joan Barfoot, Joy Kogawa, W. P. Kinsella, Nino Ricci, Rohinton Mistry, and Valérie Bah.

The winner of the annual $5,000 Amazon Canada Youth Short Story contest was also announced at the event. Nandini Parihar, one of six authors aged 13 to 17 shortlisted for the prize, won for the story “Space Between Certainties.”

The prizes are sponsored by The Walrus and Amazon Canada.