The celebrated annual fiction collection showcasing the best stories by the best new writers in Canada, all contenders for the prestigious $10,000 Writers' Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize.

Like the O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and the Best American Short Stories series, The Journey Prize Stories is one of the most celebrated annual literary anthologies in North America. But what makes it unique is its commitment to showcasing the best short stories published each year by some of Canada's most exciting new and emerging writers. For more than 25 years, the anthology has consistently introduced readers to the next generation of great Canadian authors, a tradition that proudly continues with this latest edition.
The stories included in the anthology are contenders for the $10,000 Journey Prize, which is made possible by Pulitzer Prize-winning author James A. Michener's donation of Canadian royalties from his novel Journey. The 2016 winner will be announced by the Writers' Trust of Canada in November 2016.

Kate Cayley is the author of two previous poetry collections, a young adult novel, and two short story collections, including How You Were Born, winner of the Trillium Book Award and shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. A tenth anniversary edition of How You Were Born is forthcoming from Book*hug Press in 2024. She has also written several plays, both traditional and experimental, which have been performed in Canada, the US, and the UK. She is a frequent writing collaborator with the immersive company Zuppa Theatre. Cayley has won the O. Henry Short Story Prize, the PRISM International Short Fiction Prize, the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction, and a Chalmers Fellowship. She has been a finalist for the K. M. Hunter Award, the Carter V. Cooper Short Story Prize, and the Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award, and longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize, and the CBC Literary Prizes in both poetry and fiction. In 2021, she won the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry for the title poem in Lent. She has been writer in residence at McMaster University and the Toronto Public Library, and mentored emerging writers through the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA, the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, Diaspora Dialogues, and Sisters Writes. Cayley lives in Toronto with her wife and their three children.

Kate Cayley's profile page

BRIAN FRANCIS is the author of two previous novels. His most recent, Natural Order, was selected by The Toronto Star, Kobo, and The Georgia Straight as a Best Book of the Year. His first novel, Fruit, was a Canada Reads finalist and was selected as one of Amazon and 49th Shelf’s “100 Canadian Books to Read in a Lifetime”. He lives in Toronto.

Brian Francis' profile page

Madeleine Thien's novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016 and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize 2016 and the Governor General's Award 2016. She is also the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001) and the novels Certainty (2006) and Dogs at the Perimeter (Granta, 2012), which was shortlisted for Berlin's 2014 International Literature Award and won the Frankfurt Book Fair's 2015 LiBeraturpreis. Her books and stories have been translated into 23 languages. The daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants to Canada, she lives in Montreal.

Madeleine Thien's profile page

Praise for The Journey Prize Stories:
• "The collection consistently does what the oeuvre does best: communicate intense emotion with force, give life to characters that struggle with their circumstances, illuminate the universal through the specific and the particular, and turn the commonplace into art." -- The Globe and Mail