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