2026 Evergreen Award™ Nominees
All the Parts We Exile
Written by Roza Nozari
Published by Knopf Canada
From a queer Muslim woman and artist, a generous, heartfelt and insightful memoir about family and finding the path to one’s truest self.
The youngest of three daughters, and the only one born in Canada soon after her parents’ emigration from Iran, Roza Nozari began her life hungry for a sense of belonging. From her earliest years, she shared a passion for Iranian cuisine with her mother and craved stories of their ancestral home. Eventually they visited and she fell in love with Iran’s sights and smells, and with the warm embrace of their extended family. Yet Roza sensed something was amiss with her mother’s happy, well-rehearsed story of their original departure.
As Roza grew older, this longing for home transformed into a desire for inner understanding and liberation. She was lit up by the feminist texts in her women’s studies courses, and shared radical ideas with her mother—who in turn shared more of her past, from protesting for the Islamic revolution to her ambivalence about getting married. In All the Parts We Exile, Roza braids a tender narrative of her mother’s life together with her own ongoing story of self, as she arrives at, then rejects, her queer identity, eventually finds belonging in queer spaces and within queer Iranian histories, and learns the truth about her family’s move to Canada.
Everything Is Fine Here
Written by Iryn Tushabe
Published by House of Anansi Press Inc
A beguiling coming of age novel set in Uganda in which a young woman grapples with the truth about her sister in a country that punishes gay people.
Eighteen-year-old Aine Kamara has been anticipating a reunion with her older sister, Mbabazi, for months. But when Mbabazi shows up with an unexpected guest, Aine must confront an old fear: her beloved sister is gay in a country with tight anti-homosexuality laws.
Over a weekend at Aine’s all girls’ boarding school, sisterly bonds strengthen, and a new friendship emerges between Aine and her sister’s partner, Achen. Later, a sudden death in the family brings Achen to Mbabazi’s and Aine’s village, resulting in tensions that put Mrs. Kamara’s Christian beliefs to the test. Aine runs away to Mbabazi’s and Achen’s home in Kampala, where she reconnects with her crush, Elia, a sophomore at Makerere University.
In acclaimed writer Iryn Tushabe’s dazzling debut novel, Aine must make hard choices, with inevitable and harrowing results.
Fallosophy: My Trip through Life with MS
Written by Ardra Shephard
Published by Douglas & McIntyre
A memoir based on columnist, fashion-show TV host, podcaster and MS advocate Ardra Shephard’s award-winning blog, Tripping on Air.
Twenty-three-year-old Ardra Shephard is sleeping with the wrong guy, living in a crappy apartment, and spending money she doesn’t have on designer shoes, boozy brunches and weekends in NYC. She hates her office job, but it pays for the lessons she needs to make it as an opera singer. She isn’t thrilled about her current situation, but she isn’t panicked. She knows she’s got time! Making mistakes while you figure stuff out is what your twenties are all about. But then when a doctor tells Ardra she has MS, those two letters split her life into a Before and After.
While over a million people in Canada and the United States live with Multiple Sclerosis, there is no certainty when it comes to the progression of the disease. By her mid-thirties, Ardra is struggling to walk, and it’s terrifying. When she starts using mobility aids, she faces feelings of otherness and not belonging like never before. As Ardra’s deepest fears keep coming true, she starts to learn the most important lesson: She’s been sold a lie about disability—it isn’t a fate worse than death. Having so far survived all of her worst-case scenarios, she begins to realize that a difficult life doesn’t have to be a joyless life.
Today, twenty years after her diagnosis, Ardra’s journey isn’t over. MS will always be a force to be reckoned with, but the woman Ardra is, day after day, is no longer negotiable.
Fallosophy serves up wisdom like a seasoned bartender who’s seen it all, and doesn’t try to sugarcoat what it’s really like to live with a progressive, disabling illness in a world that would rather not build a ramp.
Horsefly
Written by Mireille Gagné
Translated by Pablo Strauss
Published by Coach House Books
A chilling tale about what happens when we mess with nature.
In 1942, a young entomologist, Thomas, is sent to a remote island to work on biological weapons for the Allied military. The scientists live like prisoners while they produce anthrax and look for the perfect virus carrier among the island’s many insects.
Sixty years later, in the same region of Quebec, a heat wave unleashes swarms of horseflies while humans fall prey to strange flights of rage. Theodore is living a simple life, working double shifts and drinking to forget, when a horsefly bite stirs him from his apathy. He impulsively kidnaps his grandfather, whose dementia has him living in the past on Grosse Île.
The horseflies, meanwhile, know a few secrets…
Loosely based on historical fact, Horsefly is a terrifying tale about the ways in which we try to dominate nature, and how nature will, inevitably, wreak retribution upon us.
It Must Be Beautiful to Be Finished: A Memoir of My Body
Written by Kate Gies
Published by Scribner Canada
A raw, beautiful memoir of a girl born missing an ear, a medical system insistent on saving her from herself, and our culture’s desire to “fix” bodies.
When Kate Gies was four years old, a plastic surgeon pressed a synthetic ear to the right side of her head and pulled out a mirror. He told her he could make her “whole”—could make her “right”—and she believed him. From the age of four to thirteen, she underwent fourteen surgeries, including skin and bone grafts, to craft the appearance of an outer ear. Many of the surgeries failed, leaving permanent damage to her body.
In short, lyrical vignettes, Kate writes about how her “disfigured” body was scrutinized, pathologized, and even weaponized. She describes the physical and psychic trauma of medical intervention and its effects on her sense of self, first as a child needing to be fixed and, later, as a teenager and adult navigating the complex expectations and dangers of being a woman.
It Must Be Beautiful to Be Finished is the story of a girl desperately trying to have a body that makes her acceptable and of a woman learning to own a body she has never felt was hers to define. In an age of speaking out about the abuse of marginalized bodies, this memoir takes a hard look at the role of the medical system in body oppression and trauma.
Seventhblade
Written by Tonia Laird
Published by ECW Press
After the murder of T’Rayles’s adopted son, the infamous warrior and daughter of the Indigenous Ibinnas returns to the colonized city of Seventhblade ready to tear the streets asunder in search of her son’s killer. T’Rayles must lean into the dangerous power of her inherited sword and ally herself with questionable forces, including the Broken Fangs, an alliance her mother founded, now fallen into greed and corruption, and the immortal Elraiche, a powerful and manipulative deity exiled from a faraway land. Navigating the power shifts in a colonized city on the edge and contending with a deadly new power emerging from within, T’Rayles risks everything to find the answers, and the justice, she so desperately desires.
Loaded with complex characters and intricately staged action, and set in a fragmented, fascinating world of dangerous magics and cryptic gods, Seventhblade is a masterful new fantasy adventure from a bright emerging Indigenous voice.
The Tiger and the Cosmonaut
Written by Eddy Boudel Tan
Published by Viking
A noirish page-turner about a mysterious disappearance and a moving portrait of a Chinese Canadian family navigating insecurities, expectations, and simmering anger in their small BC town.
Casper Han grew up the dutiful son of immigrants who never felt entirely welcome in their remote corner of British Columbia. Now an adult, living in Vancouver with a boyfriend whose privilege he quietly resents, Casper rarely returns to his hometown, the site of a grief his family doesn’t discuss: the loss of his twin brother, Sam.
Over twenty years have passed since Sam went missing, and a crisis brings Casper and his siblings back. Their father has vanished, only to be found wandering the vast woods beyond the family home, confused and clutching a pair of scissors, seemingly trapped in the memory of that tragic night. In order to move forward, the Han family must finally confront the past and untangle the mystery of what really happened to Sam.
Combining the atmosphere and intrigue of a cracking good suspense novel with the depth of a rich character study, The Tiger and the Cosmonaut tells the story of a family whose members have long made themselves small and quiet and obedient—and what happens when the cycle is finally broken.
Waiting for the Long Night Moon
Written by Amanda Peters
Published by Harper Perennial
An intimate and personal debut collection of short fiction from the bestselling author of The Berry Pickers.
The stories in Waiting for the Long Night Moon explore the Indigenous experience from an astonishingly wide spectrum in time and place—from contact with the first European settlers, to the forced removal of Indigenous children, to the present-day fight for the right to clean water. Amanda Peters portrays the dignity of traditional Indigenous life, the humiliations of systemic racism, and the resilient power to endure by melding traditional storytelling with her signature style of evocative, spare prose.
A young man returns from residential school only to realize he can no longer communicate with his own parents. A young woman finds purpose and healing on the front lines as a water protector. An old man remembers his life as he patiently waits for death. And a young girl nervously dances in her first Mawi’omi. The collection also includes the Indigenous Voices Award–nominated story “Pejipug (Winter Arrives)” as well the Indigenous Voices Award-winning title story.
At times sad, sometimes disturbing, but always redemptive, the stories in Waiting for the Long Night Moon will remind you that where there is grief there is also joy, where there is trauma there is resilience and, most importantly, there is power.
What I Know About You
Written by Éric Chacour
Translated by Pablo Strauss
Published by Coach House Books
A heartbreaking tale of a family and an impossible love, torn apart by secrets and traditions in late-twentieth-century Cairo.
As a boy in 1960s Cairo, Tarek knows that his entire life is written in advance. He’ll be a doctor like his father, marry, and have children. Under the watchful eyes of his mother and his sister, he starts to do just that – until Ali enters his life and turns it upside down. The two men, from very different worlds, embark on an unsayable relationship that threatens to tear apart Tarek’s family.
Years later, as Tarek is living a solitary life in Montreal, someone starts writing about him and to him, piecing together a past he wants only to forget. But who is the writer of this tale? And will he figure it out in time?
Where the Jasmine Blooms
Written by Zeina Sleiman
Published by Fernwood Publishing
Two Palestinian cousins with very different lives meet in Lebanon and discover their family’s political secrets amid the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war.
Yasmine enters Lebanon escaping a messy divorce and seeking the family, culture, and connection that her Palestinian mother hid during their life in Toronto. It’s 2006, and she’s meeting her cousin Reem for the first time after connecting over social media. Reem teaches Arabic and lives in a refugee camp with her mother and sister. Her brother Ahmed lived there too until he went to Syria for work and then disappeared. When Yasmine receives a package of mysterious letters suggesting her father might still be alive, the cousins embark on a discovery of political secrets no one in the family wants them to know.
Complicating her questions about identity, belonging, and healing even further, Yasmine runs into Ziyad — an old flame who’s incidentally taking Reem’s class. Though the cousins’ lives could not be more different, Yasmine and Reem must learn from each other as they navigate abusive relationships, grief, displacement, and war.
Set amid the arid glamour of Lebanon’s beaches and urban landscapes, Where the Jasmine Blooms is at once a political historical thriller and a Muslim feminist love story. Turn-of-the-century Arab politics feature prominently, echoing loudly even twenty years later.
