The Hilary Weston International Award: An Evening with Hanif Abdurraqib
About this Event
Join us on Monday, September 14 at the Royal Ontario Museum, for an evening with the 2026 Hilary Weston International Award winner, hosted by Ali Hassan of CBC’s Canada Reads. Hanif Abdurraqib is an American memoirist and poet known for his distinctive style of cultural and artistic criticism through the lens of music, sport, and contemporary American issues. In a creative and wide-ranging talk, he will bring his unique and rare intellect to the role of nonfiction in our society, and his relationship to it as someone from an unconventional background. He’ll then sit down for wide-ranging and free-wheeling conversation with a member of the award jury and author Tessa McWatt. Jurors said his “work sings and stings and brings truths, both personal and communal, as he voices culture and its complexities with bold, compassionate lyricism and a real sense of love,” and that is what he will bring to the stage.
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Hanif Abdurraqib is an award-winning essayist, cultural critic, and poet from Columbus, Ohio. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His poetry has appeared in Muzzle and Vinyl, among other journals. Abdurraqib’s first collection of essays, They Can't K*ll Us Until They K*ll Us, was named a book of the year by NPR, Oprah Magazine, and The Chicago Tribune. His second collection, Go Ahead In The Rain, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and was longlisted for the National Book Award. A Little Devil In America won the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2021, Abdurraqib was named a MacArthur Fellow and in 2024 a Windham-Campbell Prize recipient. His newest release, There’s Always This Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Nonfiction and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
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About the Hilary Weston International Award
The $75,000 Hilary Weston International Award honours the career achievement of an international author for a body of nonfiction work. The past winners are Robert Macfarlane, Pankaj Mishra, and Leslie Jamison. It is a companion prize to the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, now in its 16th year and also valued at $75,000.
Both are supported by The Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation through a multiyear funding commitment. Collectively, the Weston Prizes deliver more than $230,000 to writers each year, including funds to finalists and adjudicators, representing one of the most generous commitments to nonfiction literature in the world.
The Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction is awarded annually for literary excellence in the category of nonfiction. Past winners include Martha Baillie for There Is No Blue, Christina Sharpe for Ordinary Notes, Dan Werb for The Invisible Siege, Tomson Highway for Permanent Astonishment, Rosemary Sullivan for Stalin’s Daughter, and Naomi Klein for This Changes Everything. In 2011, Hon. Hilary M. Weston began supporting the award and it is now funded by
The Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
CAD 15.00 to CAD 20.00
