A handful of Canadian authors, including beloved Manitoba-born author Miriam Toews, have landed on the long lists for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Every year awards are given in six categories — fiction, non-fiction, biography, autobiography, poetry and criticism — for books chosen by National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) committees for each genre. As you’d guess by its name, the U.S.-based NBCC is made up of reviewers.

The autobiography category sees two CanLit heavyweights in contention — Toews for A Truce That Is Not Peace and Margaret Atwood for Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts.

In the fiction category, Montreal’s Madeleine Thien is in the running for her novel The Book of Records, her first book-length work of fiction in nine years (following the Giller Prize and Governor General’s Literary Award-winning Do Not Say We Have Nothing).

Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi’s latest collection, The Book of Interruptions (Wolsak and Wynn, 96 pages, $22), speaks to the present political and cultural moment on the left. These are, in part, documentary poetics for a dissociative, violent age, an accumulation of “horror’s lyricism/ such/ a theatrical end times.”

In the resonance of “an echo/ of a city/ that screams/ and screams/ and screams” Mohammadi uses a combination of dream- and delirium-inflected language amplified by and in tension with the material conditions of the speaker’s life: “in the city that screams/ my thoughts are taller than me/ I’m between two hemispheres/ tight-latched with worries of inflation.” The collection gathers momentum fragment on fragment, image upon image, motif on motif, to disorienting effect.

The final movement folds language and time on themselves and engages with a tradition of revolutionary messianism. Like the rest of the collection, this poem is at once disorienting, compelling, and urgent: “a foretold history where no future is an epoque (…) a word, then a word then anger. a word salad a word sandwich. a language crashing at the heat of the sun.”

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