Julia Cottrelle

"I'm a believer that stories can heal, sustain, connect, facilitate processing, and change outdated narratives."

I'm a Toronto-based writer. In 2026, I won the RBC Writer's Trust Award for Fiction. My work has been a finalist for The Fiddlehead's CNF Contest and longlisted for The New Quarterly's Peter Hinchliffe Prize for Fiction. My writing appears in subTerrain, the Emerging Writer's Reader's Series, Emerge, and Room Magazine. I'm currently working on two novels and an interconnected collection of short stories.

• "The Old Turtle Climb" 2026 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers — Short Fiction

  "Just as a bumblebee seems to defy the laws of physics every time it takes flight, so too does Julia Cottrelle's quietly devastating story 'The Old Turtle Climb' carry such emotional and thematic weight as to risk failure, which is the mark of true artistry. Through assured and coolly intelligent prose, Cottrelle explores a mother's raw grief at the loss of a stillborn baby, intertwined with images of animal birth and death that are at turns clinical, heartbreaking, and bleakly funny — and often all at once. This is a haunting and authentic depiction of a wounded soul attempting to live through a deep hurt." 2026 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award Jury — Jamaluddin Aram, Jen Neale, Nathan Whitlock

• "Run Me Out of Rain" — Room Magazine

  "From the first page, I was so impressed by the language and imagery in your story, and the haunting, unsettled, fragmented shape of it. I have been thinking about the line 'I sink into my sheets, the dog prays over me' on a loop since I read it. This story has such an incredible voice, at times ferocious, at times lost. Each scene is vividly rendered, and the overall effect — a kind of disembodied embodiment."

• "Letting Go" — The Fiddlehead Finalist, CNF Contest
• The New Quarterly Longlist, Peter Hinchliffe Prize for Fiction
• "Aurora Borealis" — subTerrain
• "The Pivot" — Emerging Writer's Reader's Series
• "Sustenance" — Existere
• Emerge '21

• 2026 RBC Writer's Trust Award for Fiction Winner
• The Writer's Studio, SFU — 2021 Instructor: JJ Lee
• Certificate of Writing, Guelph-Humber Mentor: Colin McAdam
• MA, Psychiatry Cardiff University
• Editorial Board The Fiddlehead & Prism