Alumna Lisa Foad '20 Shortlisted for 2020 Writers' Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize

Recent alumna Lisa Foad ’20 has been named a finalist for the 2020 Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize for her short story “Hunting.” This renowned award recognizes the year’s best short story written by an emerging writer and first published in a Canadian literary journal. 

Foad’s debut collection of short stories, The Night is a Mouth (Exile Editions, 2009) won the the ReLit Award for Short Fiction in 2009 and was a finalist for the 2010 Writer’s Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize. 

In “Hunting,” which was first published in Taddle Creek, five motherless girls do what it takes to survive in a violent, dystopian world ruled by men and their appetites. The story is an excerpt from a novel-in-progress by the same name. 

“Written in gripping, clear-eyed prose, the story is shot through with violence that is neither romanticized or gratuitous. In Foad’s masterful hands, each act is essential—and even beautiful—with an internal velocity that hurls itself towards a heartstopper of a final line,” said the Journey Prize’s jury. 

The winner of the 2020 Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize will be announced on October 21, 2020 at the Digital Writers’ Trust Awards: Emerging Writers Edition. The recipient will be awarded a monetary prize of $10,000. 

Foad’s work has appeared in Taddle Creek, ELQ Magazine, Poetry is Dead, and elsewhere. Her short fiction has been awarded a Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Prize and she was the recipient of the Felipe P. De Alba Fellowship, as well as a nominee for the Henfield Prize, during her time at the School of the Arts. She lives in Toronto.