Joshua
Wales
Joshua Wales is a writer, physician, and MFA student at the University of British Columbia. His poetry and prose have been published in Plenitude, Grain, The New Quarterly, The Globe and Mail, and by CBC. Wales won the 2020 Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award and has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, PRISM international’s Jacob Zilber Short Fiction Prize, and CV2’s Young Buck Poetry Prize. Originally from Haliburton, Ontario, he now lives in Toronto on the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat, Seneca, and Mississaugas of the Credit River.
Award History
Jury Citation
“At the start of Joshua Wales’ ‘Mass Effect,’ Ivan’s boyfriend Eddie begins experiencing seizures and is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Despite a bleak premise, Wales bucks the reader’s expectations by gifting Ivan and Eddie with pitch dark humour as a coping mechanism — and leads them to a climax at once absurd and believable. Emotionally rich and at times uncomfortably funny, ‘Mass Effect’ is a heartbreaking, character-driven story about the perplexing humanity that life-altering experiences can reveal in us.”
— 2021 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award short fiction jury (J.R. McConvey, Zalika Reid-Benta, and John Elizabeth Stintzi)
