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Meet the recipients of the 2026 Emerging Writers Prizes

Congratulations to the 2026 recipients of WFNS’s three Emerging Writers Prizes!

Established between 2021 and 2023, these three prizes support writers as they advance book-length works-in-progress and as they undertake creative writing mentorships and professional training to advance their literary careers.

  • The Charles R. Saunders Prize (valued at $3000) encourages literary creation in speculative fiction by emerging writers of marginalized backgrounds—in short, writing by someone like Charles R. Saunders at the beginning of his career.
  • The Elizabeth Venart Prize (valued at $1750) recognizes the unique barriers to literary creation faced by women and other marginalized genders—in particular, the lack of time and space imposed by systems of gendered labour and gendered childrearing.
  • The Senator Don Oliver Black Voices Prize (valued at $5000) recognizes the barriers to literary creation and recognition faced by Black and African Nova Scotian writers—who have been and still are marginalized by systemic inequality, including within Canadian publishing.

Norman Ho

2026 Charles R. Saunders Prize

Man Long 'Norman' Ho is an emerging writer and director from Hong Kong, now based in Nova Scotia. A ReelWorld Emerging 20, RBC YFF Mentorship, and DOC Atlantic Breakthrough Program alum, his debut short, Spud Island?, was nominated at the 76th Yorkton Film Festival. He is a recipient of the Grand Jury Prize in the 2025 ScreenCraft Family Screenplay Competition and the IRSA Newcomers to Canada Award at the 2022 Island Literary Awards. He is currently the writer-in-residence at Eyelevel Artist Run Centre.

Norman’s prize-winning submission is an excerpt from his speculative novel-in-progress, The Neroli Rescue, a socio-political survival sci-fi about miners from diverse backgrounds trapped underground after a catastrophic collapse on a distant asteroid mining colony.

Sarah Mian

2026 Elizabeth Venart Prize

Sarah Mian's debut novel, When the Saints, won the Margaret & John Savage First Book Award, the Jim Connors Book Award, and was a finalist for the national Stephen Leacock Medal. She lives in Queensland, Nova Scotia, where she has been working for many years on her second novel, The World in Awful Sleep.

The story follows two artists who move into a deconsecrated church in a remote seaside village in Nova Scotia. It is in keeping with Mian's goals to create complex, memorable characters, and to use familiar sets-ups and landscapes as the canvas for unexpected events.

Guyleigh Johnson

2026 Senator Don Oliver Black Voices Prize

Guyleigh Johnson is an author, artist, advocate, facilitator, and filmmaker from the vibrant community of Dartmouth North. She has published two books, Expect the Unexpected and Afraid of the Dark, through Pottersfield Press. She has also directed her own short film, Scratching the Surface, in collaboration with Being Black in Canada (Halifax) and was nominated for a 2023 Canadian Screen Award for Best Direction, Documentary Series. In 2018 she won the Ancestral Roots Award presented by the Delmore "Buddy" Daye Learning Institute. She has a passion for collaboration and community development implemented through an Afrocentric lens of collective care, responsibility and values.

Guyleigh's prize-winning submission is an excerpt from Full Court Press, a YA novel that follows fifteen-year-old Dee, an African Nova Scotian boy from Dartmouth, as he navigates grief, peer pressure, and failure.

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Experience Levels

The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) uses the following terms to describe writers’ experience levels:

  • New writers: those with less than two years’ creative writing experience and/or no short-form publications (e.g., short stories, personal essays, or poems in literary magazines, journals, anthologies, or chapbooks).
  • Emerging writers: those with more than two years’ creative writing experience and/or numerous short-form publications.
  • Early-career authors: those with 1 or 2 book-length publications or the equivalent in book-length and short-form publications.
  • Established authors: those with 3 or 4 book-length publications.
  • Professional authors: those with 5 or more book-length publications.

Please keep in mind that each form of creative writing (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, writing for children, writing for young adults, and others) provides you with a unique set of experiences and skills, so you might consider yourself an ‘established author’ in one form but a ‘new writer’ in another.

Occasionally, WFNS uses the phrase “emerging and established writers/authors” to mean ‘writers and authors of all experience levels.’

The “Recommended experience level” section of each workshop description refers to the above definitions. A workshop’s participants should usually have similar levels of creative writing and / or publication experience. This ensures that each participant gets value from the workshop⁠ and is presented with info, strategies, and skills that suit their experience. 

For “intensive” and “masterclass” workshops, which provide more opportunities for peer-to-peer feedback, the recommended experience level should be followed closely.

For all other workshops, the recommended experience level is just that—a recommendation—and we encourage potential participants to follow their own judgment when registering.

If uncertain about your experience level with respect to any particular workshop, please feel free to contact us at communications@writers.ns.ca