Shortlisted for the 2024 Pat Lowther Memorial Award
Shortlisted for the 2024 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

The islands of an archipelago are isolated above sea level but attached underwater; connected yet separate. archipelago, the debut poetry collection from Laila Malik, traces fragments of family, becoming and unbecoming against the shifting shorelines of loss, multigenerational migration, and (un)belonging.

Malik's lyrical poems intertwine histories of exile and ecological devastation. Beginning with a coming of age in the 80s and 90s between Canada, the Arabian Gulf, East Africa and Kashmir, they subvert conventions of lineage, instead drawing on the truths of inter-ethnic histories amidst sparse landscapes of deserts, oceans, and mountains. They question why the only certainties of "home" are urgency and impossibility.

At its core, archipelago is a letter to the daughters who come before and after, a quiet disclosure of barbed ancestral legacies that only come into focus through poetry.

LAILA MALIK is a desisporic settler and writer living in Adobigok, traditional land of Indigenous communities that include the Anishinaabe, Seneca, Mohawk Haudenosaunee, and Wendat. Her work has been widely published in literary magazines and journals, including Contemporary Verse 2, Canthius, The New Quarterly, Ricepaper, Qwerty, Room, Sukoon, The Bangalore Review, and Archetype. Malik's essays have been longlisted for four different creative nonfiction contests and she was a fellow at the Banff Centre for Creative Arts in 2021. Her debut collection archipelago was included in CBC’s Spring 2023 Poetry Collections to Watch For.

Laila Malik's profile page

• Short-listed, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
• Short-listed, Pat Lowther Memorial Award

“Malik’s poems carry the weight of unearthed treasures, ancient fragments of wisdom that researchers might devote their careers to piecing together. It is the deft juxtaposition between the ‘you’ and the ‘I’ and Malik’s culturally specific language that makes some poems, like ‘crooked elbows,’ so enthralling.” —Zoe Binder, ZYZZYVA

“Malik’s poems carry the weight of unearthed treasures, ancient fragments of wisdom that researchers might devote their careers to piecing together. It is the deft juxtaposition between the ‘you’ and the ‘I’ and Malik’s culturally specific language that makes some poems, like ‘crooked elbows,’ so enthralling.” —Zoe Binder, ZYZZYVA

"archipelago by Laila Malik is the poetic expression of the geographic—a host of voices, overlapping, harmonious, discordant, dark, and humorous in turns. Grief can make an island of anyone: these poems can bring you to new shores." —Nasser Hussain, author of SKY WRI TEI NGS

“In her debut collection, archipelago, Laila Malik considers un-belonging as a way of being.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“In her evocative debut collection, Laila Malik draws on memory, not only personal recollection but ancestral and cultural heritage.” —Toronto Star

“In her debut collection, archipelago, Laila Malik considers un-belonging as a way of being.” —Winnipeg Free Press

"There is so much movement in archipelago, but the meditations on home vis-a-vis the Gulf are most exciting for their rarity—this may be the first full-length poetry collection in English to take the Gulf itself as its subject matter. The impulse to erase the place you are in because it is erasing you is too strong. Yet though they dwell on the discomfort, vulnerability and potential violence of not-belonging, these poems feel equally at home everywhere, moving very naturally and horizontally between parts of Canada, the Arabian Gulf, East Africa, and South Asia, and reminding us that migration and movement are written into the very histories of these regions." —Noor Naga, Scotiabank Giller Prize­–shortlisted author of If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“In her debut collection, archipelago, Laila Malik considers un-belonging as a way of being.” —Winnipeg Free Press

"archipelago by Laila Malik is the poetic expression of the geographic—a host of voices, overlapping, harmonious, discordant, dark, and humorous in turns. Grief can make an island of anyone: these poems can bring you to new shores." —Nasser Hussain, author of SKY WRI TEI NGS

"There is so much movement in archipelago, but the meditations on home vis-a-vis the Gulf are most exciting for their rarity—this may be the first full-length poetry collection in English to take the Gulf itself as its subject matter. The impulse to erase the place you are in because it is erasing you is too strong. Yet though they dwell on the discomfort, vulnerability and potential violence of not-belonging, these poems feel equally at home everywhere, moving very naturally and horizontally between parts of Canada, the Arabian Gulf, East Africa, and South Asia, and reminding us that migration and movement are written into the very histories of these regions." —Noor Naga, Scotiabank Giller Prize­–shortlisted author of If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“In her evocative debut collection, Laila Malik draws on memory, not only personal recollection but ancestral and cultural heritage.” —Toronto Star

"In Laila Malik's archipelago, we face the future like we face the sea, or the desert: any great expanse we try to love, cross, or become. Malik's vocabulary is a bridge—littered with secrets, inside jokes, careful references—that carries us over various landscapes, oceans, the wreckages of capitalism, colonialism and climate collapse. A play on words is a play on politics because 'history is a weapon of mass destruction.' Encyclopedic in its cataloguing of our failures, spellbinding in its refusal to give up or into hope, this debut collection is a map of our devastations and desperation in equal part." —Sanna Wani, Trillium Book Award for Poetry­–winning author of My Grief, the Sun

“Malik’s poems carry the weight of unearthed treasures, ancient fragments of wisdom that researchers might devote their careers to piecing together. It is the deft juxtaposition between the ‘you’ and the ‘I’ and Malik’s culturally specific language that makes some poems, like ‘crooked elbows,’ so enthralling.” —Zoe Binder, ZYZZYVA

"In Laila Malik's archipelago, we face the future like we face the sea, or the desert: any great expanse we try to love, cross, or become. Malik's vocabulary is a bridge—littered with secrets, inside jokes, careful references—that carries us over various landscapes, oceans, the wreckages of capitalism, colonialism and climate collapse. A play on words is a play on politics because 'history is a weapon of mass destruction.' Encyclopedic in its cataloguing of our failures, spellbinding in its refusal to give up or into hope, this debut collection is a map of our devastations and desperation in equal part." —Sanna Wani, Trillium Book Award for Poetry­–winning author of My Grief, the Sun