Renato Gandia, Julia Cottrelle, and Graham Slaughter are the winners of the 2026 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. (Writers’ Trust of Canada)

Renato Gandia, Julia Cottrelle, and Graham Slaughter have been named winners of the 2026 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers.

The award, established in 1994 and administered by the Writers’ Trust of Canada, grants $10,000 annually to a writer of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. The winners were named at an event in Toronto on June 1.

Each of this year’s winners was one of three writers shortlisted for the award in April. The shortlisted finalists each received $2,500.

Gandia was named the poetry winner for “Psalmody for the Estranged.” The jury comprised of Jeff Latosik, Zehra Naqvi, and Chuqiao Yang selected it as the winner out of 143 submissions.

“These poems appeal to our basic needs to belong, to experience awe, to be seen, and to be accepted,” the jury wrote in their citation. “They are alchemical and spellbinding in the way they transform small, quiet moments — a turn of phrase, a partner’s touch, familiar objects, a domestic routine — into moments of sacred encounter.”

Cottrelle was named the winner of the short fiction prize for “The Old Turtle Climb,” which the jury called a “quietly devastating story” that “[carries] such emotional and thematic weight as to risk failure, which is the mark of true artistry.”

Jamaluddin Aram, Jen Neale, and Nathan Whitlock comprised the jury for the short fiction prize, and read 172 submissions to select the winner and finalists.

Slaughter, who was shortlisted for the Bronwen Wallace Award in 2025, won the creative nonfiction prize for “The Perfect Home For Your Child.”

A jury comprised of Alison Calder, Robert McGill, and Padma Viswanathan wrote that Slaughter’s work “brings equal measures of acuity and empathy to its story of a would-be adoptive couple as they wait for a prospective birth mother to decide if she will keep her child.”

The Bronwen Wallace Award is supported by RBC, which has supported the award since 2007.