“The Fish” Wins 2025 Blank Spaces/CHP Writing Contest
Jamie Malina’s “The Fish” has been selected as the winning story for the 2025 Blank Spaces/Chicken House Press anthology contest. Grand prize judge Benjamin Rempel (CHP author of Infect and Mutate) announced the winner during a virtual celebration on December 15th, with Lisa Jones’ “Daylight Savings” receiving honourable mention.
“All of the stories were exceptional,” Rempel said. “But these two stories were taut and crisp—never a word wasted—immediately plunging the reader into a vivid setting. They were well-paced and mysterious and attention-grabbing. They spoke of themes greater than themselves.”
Malina, a Toronto-based writer, told us the next morning: “I was and am still over the moon at this news.”
His winning story joins seven other exceptional pieces in The Long Dark, an anthology exploring the territories we inhabit when light fails—the darkness we endure and the darkness we create. From dystopian horrors to quiet domestic reckonings, from folk parables to urgent contemporary dramas, these eight stories from Canadian writers map landscapes of grief, obsession, guilt, and the stubborn human insistence on continuing even when we're not sure why.
The collection features a foreword by Benjamin Rempel and will be released in April 2026.
Read the full story about the virtual gathering and meet all eight finalists at blankspaces.ca →
