Awarding the best Canadian novel or short story collection of the year

“An audacious reinvention of the novel for a dystopian age, Batshit Seven is a canny depiction of late-stage capitalism set among the glittering towers and street markets of Hong Kong. Sheung-King deftly conveys the dilemma of the self-aware citizen through the character of Glue, a transnational would-be writer whose identity, self-respect, and even language are being insidiously dismantled by a society where everything is commodified. Assimilation or self-parody are increasingly Glue’s only options — modes of existence Sheung-King brilliantly evokes through the very language of the novel. A perfect amalgam of form and idea, Batshit Seven is poignant, darkly hilarious, and stunningly original.”—2024 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize jury (Saeed Teebi, Joan Thomas, and Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike)