Event Details
Readings from the Trillium Award Poetry Finalists.
Event Details
Readings from the Trillium Award Poetry Finalists.
Speakers for this event
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Farah Ghafoor
Farah Ghafoor
Farah Ghafoor is the author of Shadow Price (House of Anansi, 2025), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and the Raymond Souster Award, longlisted for the Toronto Book Awards, and named a CBC Best Book of the Year. Selections of Shadow Price won the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize, shortlisted for the Far Horizons Award, and longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Her work appears in post-secondary course curriculums, art exhibitions, and magazines such as The Walrus, The Offing, Brick Magazine, and The Fiddlehead. She lives in Toronto.
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Furqan Mohamed
Furqan Mohamed
Furqan Mohamed is a writer, educator, and arts worker from Toronto. Her writing has appeared in Maisonneuve, FASHION, The Local, and C Mag. She served as Guest Curator for the 2025 Mayworks Festival of Working People & the Arts, exploring fear, bodies, work, and labour justice. Her literary series, “Who’s Afraid?” is currently in-residence at the Tranzac. Furqan is occupied by poetry, culture, knowledge-sharing, and abolition. She will be telling her kids about you.
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Hajer Mirwali
Hajer Mirwali
Hajer Mirwali is a Palestinian and Iraqi writer living in Toronto. Her first book, Revolutions (Talonbooks, 2025) — a collection of poetry on shame, pleasure, and Arab Muslim girlhood — won the 2026 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and is a finalist for the 2026 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Two poems from the collection also appear in an anthology of Palestinian poetry called Heaven Looks Like Us (Haymarket Books, 2025). Hajer’s work has been published in The Ex-Puritan, Brick Magazine, Room Magazine, and Joyland.
Books
Revolutions
Revolutions sifts through the grains of Muslim daughterhood to reveal two metaphorical circles inextricably overlapping: shame and pleasure. In an extended conversation with Mona Hatoum’s artwork + and –, Revolutions asks how young Arab women – who live in homes and communities where actions are surveilled and categorized as 3aib or not 3aib, shameful or acceptable – make and unmake their identities. Working between a Palestinian and Iraqi poetics drawing from artists like Mahmoud Darwish and Naseer Shamma and a feminist Canadian poetics inspired by Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Nicole Brossard, Revolutions spirals and collapses as we turn and re-turn around its circles.
AuthorHajer Mirwali
PublisherTalon Books
Shadow Price
Borrowing its title from a finance term – “the estimated price of a good or service for which no market price exists” – Shadow Price is a stunning debut that examines the idea of value in a world that burns under our capitalist lens.
What gives life value? How do we serve existing societal structures that determine its cost? Employing both surreal and documentary imagery, Farah Ghafoor’s arresting collection articulates how narrative is used to revise the past and manipulate the future, ultimately forming our present-day climate crisis. Interrogating personal complicity, generational implications, and the shock of our collective disregard for a world that sustains every living thing, Shadow Price captures the complexities of living and writing as a young poet born in the year that “climate change denial” first appeared in print. Mourning the loss of Earth’s biodiversity, from insects to mammoths to trees, these introspective poems invite us to consider the risks and rewards of loving what may vanish in our lifetime.
Shadow Price charges readers to contemplate their power and purpose in the world today, recognizing that there is hope even in the belly of the beast.
AuthorFarah Ghafoor
PublisherHouse of Anansi
Partners
Canadian Authors Association
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