An Anglican priest has won a top literary prize for her book about Canada\u2019s homelessness crisis.<\/p>\n
Maggie Helwig received the $40,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing at a ceremony in Ottawa on Wednesday night.<\/p>\n
She took home the award for \u201cEncampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community.\u201d<\/p>\n
The book follows Helwig\u2019s fight to allow an encampment to remain in the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto\u2019s Kensington Market where she is the priest. <\/p>\n
Helwig had to go up against various authorities who wanted to clear the churchyard, and the city ultimately tore the encampment down in October, five months after the book was published.<\/p>\n
The judges call \u201cEncampment\u201d \u201ca clear-eyed call to not look away, but to deepen understanding of the issue\u201d of homelessness.<\/p>\n
The book also won the 2025 Toronto Book Award.<\/p>\n
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 30, 2026.<\/p>\n
Nicole Thompson, The Canadian Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Anglican priest has won a top literary prize for her book about Canada\u2019s homelessness crisis. Maggie Helwig…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":638390,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194291],"tags":[49,48,3302],"class_list":["post-638389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-toronto","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-toronto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=638389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/638390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=638389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=638389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=638389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}