2024 Main Jury

Sheena Kamal

Sheena Kamal is the author of four novels. She holds an HBA in Political Science from the University of Toronto and was awarded a TD Canada Trust scholarship for community leadership and activism around the issue of homelessness. Her debut novel The Lost Ones (US)/Eyes Like Mine (UK) won the 2018 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, a Strand Magazine Critics Award and Macavity Award for Best First Novel. It has been sold in fifteen countries and was a Globe and Mail Bestseller, a Time Magazine Recommended Read, an iBooks Best Book, a Bustle Best Book and a Powell's Pick. Her debut YA novel Fight Like a Girl was shortlisted for the White Pine Award. Sheena lives in Montreal.

Danny Ramadan

Danny Ramadan is a Syrian-Canadian author, public speaker, and advocate for LGBTQ+ refugees. His debut novel, The Clothesline Swing, was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award, longlisted for Canada Reads, and named a Best Book of the Year by the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star. Danny’s children book, Salma the Syrian Chef, won the Nautilus Book Award, The Middle East Book Award, and was named a Best Book by both Kirkus and School Library Journal. His latest novel, The Foghorn Echoes, was released in 2022, and his upcoming memoir, Crooked Teeth, will be released by Penguin Random House in 2024. Danny has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. During his final year at UBC in 2020, he was a finalist for the inaugural Bridge Prize award for his short story On the Miraculous Return of Khalid from the Dead. Danny lives in Vancouver.

Michelle Good

Michelle Good is a Cree writer and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After working for Indigenous organizations for twenty-five years, she obtained a law degree and advocated for residential school survivors. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia while still practising law and managing her own law firm. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada, and her poetry was included on two lists of the best Canadian poetry in 2016 and 2017. Five Little Indians, her first novel, won the HarperCollins/UBC Best New Fiction Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Award, the Evergreen Award, the City of Vancouver Book of the Year Award, and Canada Reads 2022. It was also longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes. In October 2022, Michelle received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Simon Fraser University. Her latest book, a collection of essays entitled Truth Telling: Seven Conversations About Indigenous Life in Canada, was released in May 2023.

Madeleine Thien

Madeliene Thien was born in Vancouver. She is the author of four books of fiction, including Dogs at the Perimeter and Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which received 2016 The Giller Prize and The Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her books have been shortlisted for The Booker Prize, The Women’s Prize for Fiction, and The Folio Prize, longlisted for a Carnegie Medal, and translated into more than 25 languages. Madeleine’s essays and stories can be found in The New Yorker, Granta, Brick, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New York Review of Books. She has taught literature and fiction in Canada, China, Germany, Nigeria, the United States, Zimbabwe, Singapore, and Japan and currently teaches writing and literature at the City University of New York.

George Murray

George Murray is the author of ten books, including seven books of poetry, two best-selling books of aphorisms, and a book for children; his latest being Problematica: New and Selected Poems, 1995 - 2020. His work has been widely anthologized and published in magazines, journals, and newspapers all over Canada, as well as internationally, including: The Drunken Boat, Granta, Iowa Review, Jacket, London Magazine, Mid-American Review, New American Writing, New Welsh Review, The Puritan, Radical Society and The Walrus. Raised in rural Ontario, he currently lives in St. John's, Newfoundland.

Nicholas Herring

Nicholas Herring is a carpenter and writer whose work has appeared in The Puritan and The Fiddlehead. He graduated from St. Jerome’s University in Ontario with an Honours degree in English Literature and attended the University of Toronto where he completed a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing. He received the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in 2022 for his debut novel, Some Hellish. Nicholas lives in Murray Harbour, Prince Edward Island.

Shirarose Wilensky - Editor

The Bridge Prize is excited to announced that Shirarose Wilensky, an editor with the House of Anansi Press, will work with the winning author to complete a final edit of the winning short story.

Shirarose Wilensky works for House of Anansi Press from her home in Port Moody, BC. She attended Simon Fraser University’s Master of Publishing Program and has worked for Arsenal Pulp Press, Greystone Books, Douglas & McIntyre, and Harbour Publishing. In 2021, she won the Tom Fairley Award for editing Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi. Other bestselling and acclaimed books she’s edited include A Dream of a Woman by Casey Plett, Rebent Sinner by Ivan Coyote, Shut Up You’re Pretty by Téa Mutonji, and The Woo-Woo by Lindsay Wong. She acquires and edits literary fiction and narrative non-fiction, with a special interest in BIPOC, LGBTQ2S+, and debut writers.

The winner in the 2024 competition will have editing help available from editor Shirarose Wilensky to polish the story.