Maggie Helwig’s Encampment Wins Toronto Book Award
The Diocese of Algoma joins with Anglicans across Canada in congratulating The Rev. Maggie Helwig, priest at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Anglican Church, Toronto, on receiving the 2025 Toronto Book Award for her nonfiction work Encampment (Coach House Books).
Helwig’s book offers an unflinching and deeply human account of the lives of unhoused individuals in Toronto, the challenges they face, and the Church’s call to presence and compassion amid those realities. Rooted in her ministry in Toronto’s Kensington Market, Encampment tells the story of a community that took shape on the doorstep of St. Stephen’s—and the priest who chose to accompany them.
“This recognition honours not only an extraordinary writer and priest,” says Archbishop Anne Germond, Archbishop of Algoma and Metropolitan of the Ecclesiastical Province of Ontario, “but also the Gospel witness of a Church that chooses to remain present in the hard places—where dignity, justice, and mercy meet.”
Established by Toronto City Council in 1974, the Toronto Book Awards honour books inspired by the city’s people, places, and identity. This year, the prize amount was doubled to $20,000, with Encampment singled out by the jury as “a difficult book to put down once you start reading and impossible to forget once you finish.”
For Archbishop Anne, Helwig’s work speaks to a tension many church communities across Canada are living within:
“Across our dioceses, we are seeing the visible signs of housing insecurity and encampment life in growing measure. It is not only an urban story. Maggie’s book helps us to look at these realities through the lens of faith—to remember that every tent, every tarp, shelters a beloved child of God. I commend Encampment to anyone seeking to understand how the Church can hold space for compassion and advocacy together.”
Helwig, an Anglican priest, activist, and author, has long been a voice for justice in the Church and beyond. Her earlier novel Girls Fall Down was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award and chosen as the 2012 One Book Toronto selection.
Her latest work, Encampment, is available through Coach House Books and at major booksellers.
📖 Read the CBC feature: Maggie Helwig wins $20K Toronto Book Award for nonfiction work Encampment