DECADENCE a finalist for the 2026 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction!

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Biblioasis is thrilled to share that Decadence by Richard Kelly Kemick has been announced as a finalist for the 2026 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction! You can check out all five finalists here. 

The 2026 jury citation reads:

“Richard Kelly Kemick’s Decadence provides a narrative about interiority that is funny, curious, self-deprecating, and occasionally and gloriously ridiculous. Beneath Kemick’s wit and (truly) random obsessions is an exceptionally attentive meditation about the emotional weight of quotidian life and the strange difficulty of becoming an adult. Across a range of explorations about love, grief, loneliness, failure, family, and self-worth, Kemick is refreshingly honest about the limits of introspection, even as he offers an elaborate examination of his own catalogue of shortcomings. The result of this ‘accidental memoir of a sort’ is a deeply genuine, anxiously original, and immensely enjoyable portrait of life in progress.”

The Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction was first awarded in 1997. It is given annually for excellence in the category of literary nonfiction, which includes essays, history, biography, memoir, commentary, and criticism. Each finalist is awarded $5,000, and the winner receives a prize purse of $75,000. The award was first sponsored in 2011 by the Irish-Canadian businesswoman, philanthropist and writer who served as lieutenant-governor of Ontario. She died last year at 83. The prize is now funded by the Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation. The winner will be announced at the Writers’ Trust Awards on Tuesday, November 10.

Get your copy of Decadence here!

Or, preorder our Limited Edition of the book here!

ABOUT DECADENCE

Finalist for the 2026 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction

“The genre of memoir is bullshit (as I humbly posit). No one actually lives like they are moving along some grand Freytag’s triangle. Rather, we live within isolated instances, specific struggles and victories, which, when compiled, form a narrative.”—Richard Kelly Kemick

In Decadence, Richard Kelly Kemick’s “accidental memoir of a sort,” the author ranges widely through his myriad preoccupations and obsessions—volleyball, municipal landfills, dogs, high school plays, Christmas villages, love—out of which the shape of a unique sensibility is revealed. Reminiscent of the three Davids—Rakoff, Sedaris, and Wallace—these essays accrete into a portrait of a man trying to make sense of a world in which there are no goddamn rules; and yet one in which every action has sometimes profound consequences. A book of intelligence and care and kindness and humour and yearning and the occasional epiphany, Decadence gathers up from the odds and ends of living what makes a modern life—quiet and desperate as it may at times be—worth celebrating.

ABOUT RICHARD KELLY KEMICK

Richard Kelly Kemick is an award-winning poet, journalist, and fiction writer. His debut collection of short stories, Hello, Horse, was published by Biblioasis in 2024. He is also the author of I Am Herod (available on audiobook), the poetry collection Caribou Run, and the stage play Amor De Cosmos: A Delusional Musical. Richard’s limited series podcast, Natural Life, is an intimate and unexpectedly honest documentary on his cousin, who is serving a life sentence without parole in Michigan.

DAPHNIS AND CHLOE longlisted for the Giller Prize!

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Biblioasis is thrilled to share that Colin McAdam’s Daphnis and Chloe has been longlisted for the 2026 Giller Prize! The longlist of fourteen works was selected for the first time by a jury panel of independent booksellers, and was announced this morning on September 8. View the full list here.

In a statement, Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells writes,

All of us here at Biblioasis are thrilled that Colin McAdam’s Daphnis and Chloe has been nominated for the Giller Prize. Our thanks to the jurors—independent booksellers, naturally—and to the Giller itself for recognizing the strengths of Colin’s book. Daphnis and Chloe is a book quite unlike anything else in Colin’s ouevre, and from anything else we’ve published here at Biblioasis, a hopeful book about the power of love and beauty and storytelling to create a light in the darkness, and it has as broad an appeal as anything we’ve published. We’re grateful that this nomination will help bring Colin’s gem to a wider readership.

The Giller Prize is awarded annually to a Canadian novel or short story collection published that year. The winner receives $100,000 and the shortlisted authors each receive $10,000. The 2026 shortlist will be announced on Monday, October 5, and the winner will be announced at an award ceremony on Monday, November 16 in Toronto.

Pick up your copy of Daphnis and Chloe here.

And don’t miss our Limited Edition of the book here!

ABOUT DAPHNIS AND CHLOE

Longlisted for the 2026 Giller Prize • A 2026 CIBA Booksellers’ List Selection • One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2026

A fable about love and innocence and beauty, and finding a light through the darkness.

There’s a city on an island in the Pacific that can only be reached by ferry, a city where a mechanic named Frank opens a garage with his old friend Charlie. Both men marry the women they love but are unable to have children. There are drugs on the streets of this city that take away pain for strings of minutes and bring synthetic rapture; and by these streets the couples are given two babies, abandoned under strange circumstances. The boy they name Daphnis, and the girl Chloe.

And so begins a book unlike anything else, a modern retelling of an ancient story. Part Ovid and part True Romance, and narrated by Eros himself, Daphnis and Chloe offers a pulpy meditation on love and beauty, on people triumphing over darkness by wrestling deep within it, on the solace of art, and on the simple but profound pleasure provided to a blind old man as he holds his wife’s hand and listens to an increasingly familiar story.

ABOUT COLIN MCADAM

Colin McAdam is an internationally acclaimed novelist with a PhD from Cambridge on translations of Ancient Greek—the original language of Daphnis and Chloe. He has written non-fiction for Harpers, Granta, Salon, and Hazlitt, among other journals, and his novels have won or been shortlisted for several prizes including the Amazon Best First Novel Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Governor General’s Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize, and the Giller Prize. He lives in Quebec.