Edna Staebler Awards

The Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the Edna Staebler Laurier Writer-in-Residence program are supported by an endowment established by writer and literary journalist Edna Staebler and administered by Wilfrid Laurier University.

Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction

The Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction is the only award of its kind for this genre offered in Canada. First awarded in 1991, it provides encouragement and recognition to a Canadian writer of a first or second published book. The award is valued at $10,000. 

The winner of the 2024 award is Brett Popplewell for Outsider: An Old Man, a Mountain and the Search for a Hidden Past. In his book, published by HarperCollins Canada, Popplewell recounts the life of Dag Aabye, the world’s first extreme skier. When they first met in 2015, the 74-year-old lived in a rusting school bus deep in the Okanagan forest and ran some three hours a day through the mountainous terrain to maintain his status as one of the oldest living ultramarathon runners. As Popplewell learned, part of what propelled Dag on his unusual path was the mystery of his childhood, when he was abandoned and then adopted as a young child in Nazi-occupied Norway.

Edna Staebler Laurier Writer-in-Residence

The Edna Staebler Laurier Writer-in-Residence program is a residency for Canadian writers. The length of the residency depends on year-to-year funding and local planning initiatives, but the rate per week is commensurate with Canada Council funding. If accommodation is needed, the successful applicant will live in Lucinda House, a century home close to Laurier's Waterloo campus, for the duration of the residency.

The 2025 Edna Staebler Writer-in-Residence has been awarded to novelist Thea Lim, an award-winning author of fiction and a generous member of the Canadian writing community. Lim has served as a creative writing faculty member, lecturer, workshop leader and mentor at the University of Toronto, Sheridan College, the Writers’ Trust of Canada, Writers’ Union of Canada and University of Guelph. Her critically acclaimed 2018 novel, An Ocean of Minutes – described as “a love story, an imaginative thriller and a dystopian narrative” by Publisher’s Weekly – was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and ALA Reading List for Science Fiction, longlisted for Canada Reads, and named a Globe and Mail “favourite book of the year.”  As the 2025 Edna Staebler Writer-in-Residence, Lim will deliver guest lectures, including a public talk in January titled “Boring Worlds: The Storytelling Power of the Mundane.” Students and writers in the Laurier community will have the opportunity to receive one-on-one manuscript feedback during Lim’s office hours. She will also offer writing workshops in the genres of fiction and non-fiction designed to spark creativity and literary exploration while also working on her own writing projects, including a detective novel titled Years Without a Weekend and a series of essays on “how to be an artist.”