Maggie Helwig is the winner of the 2025 Toronto Book Award for her memoir, Encampment: Resistance, Grace and An Unhoused Community (Coach House Books).
Helwig is the rector at St. Stephen-in-the-fields, an Anglican church in Toronto’s Kensington Market. Encampment tells the story of the author’s life-long activism as preparation for her fight to keep her churchyard open to unhoused people needing a home. The book confronts society’s tolerance for allowing so many to go unhoused and beseeches readers to respond with compassion and grace.
Helwig is the author of 15 books and chapbooks including Girls Fall Down, which was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award in 2012.
Encampment is the book for anyone who has ever looked at an unhoused settlement and wondered—how does this happen in a country as wealthy as Canada, in a city as vibrant and seemingly compassionate as Toronto? Encampment is the chronicle of an unhoused community on the doorstep of St. Stephen’s in the Field Anglican Church in Kensington Market. Maggie Helwig, the church pastor, becomes a champion of the encampment in her midst and details in exquisite prose the plight of the individuals who make up this unhoused community. It’s a difficult book to put down once you start reading and impossible to forget once you finish. Helwig’s exceptional storytelling compels us to care. You will never look at an unhoused community the same way again.
Other finalists included:
Browse a Toronto Public Library reading list of the 2025 longlisted titles, which includes the finalist titles above.
