UBC School of Creative Writing

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UBC School of Creative Writing

The UBC School of Creative Writing is Canada's oldest and most prestigious university writing program

The Creative Writing Program at UBC offers an undergraduate major and minor, as well as a graduate program in creative writing and a unique optional-residency MFA program. Courses are offered in a wide array of genres: poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, graphic forms, playwriting, screenwriting, lyric & libretto, new media, and radio. Faculty include Nancy Lee, Annabel Lyon, Keith Maillard, Linda Svendsen, Timothy Taylor, Bryan Wade, Maureen Medved, and Rhea Tregebov.

06/02/2026

🎓💐 Congratulations to our Spring 2026 MFA Grads!

We’re so proud of everything you’ve achieved and excited to see the UBC creative writing community grow even more!

To celebrate this significant accomplishment, we’ve compiled a special showcase to highlight the exceptional creative work produced by our graduates.

Their work spans graphic form, screenplay, memoir, fiction, writing for the stage, and young adult literature. Each profile includes a photo, a brief bio and a summary of the graduate’s thesis project.

🎉 Follow the link to view the showcase! https://creativewriting.ubc.ca/mfa-grad-showcase-may-26/

List of profiles:

- Tayf Almoghazy
- Chinelo Amadi
- Shaughn Clutchey
- Denise Da Costa
- Nicole Fitzgerald
- Lauren Grant
- Tristan Hay Lee
- Christal Rose Hazelton
- Yash Khajuria
- Laurence Neal
- Ayda Niknami
- Leslie Palleson
- Camille Pavlenko
- Gabrielle Rutman
- Elio Zarrillo

05/21/2026

Happy Graduation! 🎓 Thank you to everyone who shared their hard work in the Graduate Reading. Once a writer, always a writer. We are grateful to celebrate this milestone in your creative writing journey, and we look forward to reading more from you!

05/19/2026

This spring, Lecturer Sara Graefe is writing her new play "Courage" right in the heart of the Canadian Rockies alongside fellow playwrights and dramaturgs from across Canada. The 2-week Playwrights Lab at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity is dedicated to supporting the development of new theatrical work in a generative, artist-centered environment. We cannot wait to see the work that will grow out of such an inspiring setting!

Photo credit: Rita Taylor

Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity

05/16/2026

Past winners of the HarperCollinsPublishersLtd/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction have covered a range of topics shaped by their voices and convictions. Cree writer Michelle Good tells the heartbreaking yet uplifting stories of residential school survivors in Five Little Indians. Drawing on her educational background in history and Holocaust studies, Ellen Keith sheds light on the overlooked victims of the N**i concentration camp brothels and the 1970s Argentine Dirty War in The Dutch Wife. In Book of Sands, Karim Alrawi, who was born in Egypt, crafts a powerful tale of family life amid the Arab Spring.

Is there a story calling you to be told?

📌 Submissions for the 2026 HarperCollinsPublishersLtd/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction are open till May 31. Click link for details: https://creativewriting.ubc.ca/about/prize-for-best-new-fiction/

HarperCollins Canada Cooke McDermid

05/13/2026

Celebrate short story month with five local writers, including UBC Creative Writing Professor Alix Ohlin, conversing about the art and craft of this wily and often misunderstood genre. Follow link to register is on theVPL website: https://vpl.bibliocommons.com/events/69b1d3ef81b67dfe32abee58

05/09/2026

Based on Léa’s personal experience, A Drop in the Ocean is a gritty, humanizing portrait of living with mental illness.

It follows sixteen-year-old Mira Durand, who has just been checked into the secure unit of the Residency Adolescent Treatment Centre for obsessive compulsive and comorbid disorders. With four years being passed around different psych wards like a hot potato, worsening her OCD and anorexia, her only friend is her journal.

But at the Residency’s Ward 2, Mira discovers that her shrink is a fellow fantasy nerd and that her wardmates have enough of their own high-risk behaviours to tolerate hers. It takes visiting Gung Gung, her dying maternal grandfather, however, for her to realize that to truly live, she must fight the cognitive distortions at the heart of her compulsions…

📍Follow link to read the except. https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/D/Drop-in-the-Ocean-A

05/06/2026

“I want the audience to understand that what happened in Afghanistan can happen here - that no rights are ever guaranteed,” said Brishkay Ahmed on her award-winning documentary, In the Room.

The documentary follows the resistance stories of five Afghan women—from celebrated singer Mozhdah Jamalzadah to director and activist Nelofer Pazira-Fisk—on what it means to speak, and survive, as an Afghan woman in a world that continuously attempts to silence them.

She credited the UBC CRWR program with teaching her how to bring different voices to life in documentary filmmaking, “In this film, I really leaned on identity and the nuanced characterization of each woman, and the importance of situating the audience into each of their worlds. That sense of setup felt very similar to building a narrative piece.”

🎥 In the Room is available for watching on the National Film Board of Canada website.

05/03/2026

Receiving raving reviews since its launch, MFA alum Sheila James's debut novel, Outcaste, is an epic tale exploring India's caste system that spans fifty years, four generations, and two continents.

It follows Malika and Rayappa, who are both deemed "untouchable". When Malika, a communist resistance fighter, prepared to assassinate the new governor in a village in the recently independent India, she hesitated — recognizing the man riding in the car. Now, 50 years later, that man, Rayappa, is living in Canada. He receives a letter asking for information about Malika. Deciding to return to India with his family, Rayappa, is forced to revisit the turbulent history of their hometown, and his own...

04/28/2026

How might occult history play a role in our increasingly post-secular future?

In this panel discussion on Tuesday, May 5, the scholars will explore the impact of seemingly marginal and fringe belief systems that have shaped popular literary genres, theories of religion, and understandings of s*x, gender, and race.

Speakers:
Dr Joy Dixon, History, UBC
Dr Christine Ferguson, English Studies, University of Stirling
Dr Aren Roukema, English Language and Literatures, UBC

This event is open to all and free to attend. You may also join by livestream. Visit https://greencollege.ubc.ca/events/occultism-history-and-literature-why-margins-matter for full details.

04/24/2026

“Reading fiction is one of the most effective ways to build empathy for other people. So much of hatred and bigotry is the result of fear, and we fear what we don't understand,” shares UBC’s School of Creative Writing Adjunct Professor and MFA alum Loghan Paylor, whose debut novel, The Cure for Drowning, wins Canada Reads 2026.

“This is one reason why filling our reading lists, book club picks and libraries with diverse voices is more important than ever, because it translates an unknown into a familiar, intimate relationship, and helps us expand our theory of mind.”

“I would hope that by reading my book, readers come away with an understanding that we all struggle in some way with the labels and boxes that society ascribes to us, and recognize that we have more in common than we realize,” they added.

Set in a small Ontario town, The Cure for Drowning follows a pair of q***r and non-binary characters navigating love, identity, and belonging, after a love triangle and, subsequently, the Second World War tear them apart.

Read more on how Paylor’s own quest for belonging inspired their debut novel and how their book tour solidified their belief that books build bridges.
https://creativewriting.ubc.ca/news/the-cure-for-drowning-by-loghan-paylor-wins-canada-reads-2026/

Address

Buchanan E-462, 1866 Main Mall
Vancouver, BC
V6T1Z1

Telephone

+16048220699

Website

http://creativewriting.ubc.ca/

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