Announcing the 2026 UC Writing Award Winners

The college hosted four writing competitions open to UC and UC program students as part of the annual UC Writing Awards: the Meyer (Mike) Greenstein Memorial Student Award for Writing Excellence, the Norma Epstein Foundation Awards in Creative Writing, the Frederic Davidson Competition, and the Lorne Tepperman Prize in Public Writing.

Here are this year's winners, with comments from the Awards Committee for first-prize winners:

UC Writing Award Winners, 2026

Frederic Davidson Competition (UC):

First prize:

Maria Petersen, "To Name Is to Break: Queer Restoration in the Margins of In the Dream House" (academic essay)

One member of the awards committee praised Maria Petersen's "To Name Is to Break" as "an unexpected and exciting departure from the safe, well-trodden, and primarily trauma-focused exegesis that has come to dominate the scholarship" on a landmark memoir. Another committee member referred to the prose as "gorgeous."

Second prize:

Kristine Nguyen, "The tale of mangrove tree of Ca Mau, Vietnam” (academic essay)

Third prize:

Druphadi Sen, "Why Mickey Mouse Needed A Clubhouse" (academic essay)

Lorne Tepperman Prize in Public Writing (UC):

No winner for 2026

Meyer (Mike) Greenstein Memorial Student Award for Writing Excellence (UC):

Gurleena Sukhija, "PILGRIMS IN DISTRESS" (poetry)

Former Toronto and national Poet Laureate George Elliot Clarke commented that "Gurleena Sukhija's entry, Pilgrims in Distress, is the highly deserving recipient of the 2026 Greenstein Award for achievement in poetry given her astonishing expertise in conjuring cinematic scene-setting and emotive psychology out of the carefully cadenced, though also sometimes startling, use of verbs, nouns, and adjectives. There is poise and confidence in the writing, while also an invite to the reader to empathize with the vivid 'feelings' that the poetry conjures. This is a poet who should be published, and very likely, will be published, in short order. She is a discovery."

The Norma Epstein Foundation Awards in Creating Writing (UC):
 

First prize:

Mehrasa Kheiriza, "My mother calls from a war I cannot touch," (other prose)

The committee had little trouble awarding first prize to "My mother calls from a war I cannot touch" for its unfailing intelligence and the precision and freshness of its prose. It manages to convey, with impressive eloquence, the dilemma of a young woman who, in her own words, does "not know how to answer a call from war."

Second prize:

Hannah Smith, "THE FOREST DOES NOT MOVE FOR YOU" (short story)

Third prize:

Arsh Aashi, "Autobiographical Reflection" (other prose)

Adeetya Kakkarr, "The Covered Distance" (poetry)

Keely Boyle, "Still Night" (short story)

Congratulations to all of our winners, and thank you to those who made a submission!