Category: Fiction

Excerpt from Issue 306 (Winter 2026)
"Faultline" by Ariadne Asho
Winner of The Fiddlehead's 2025 Fiction Contest

The car stopped at a field full of houses. Houses like autumn squash. Houses like spiral-rolled bales of hay. 

Aoife scuffed across the earthy corduroy of the back seat, against wide wales that trapped within them cracker crumbs, cat-fur strands, rustcoloured pine needles. Her sister Lilou — reedy, blondie Lilou — gamboled out the other side, to face the field and a muddy ditch of clay and granite. 

Excerpt from Issue 305 (Autumn 2025)
"The Cure" by Michelle Spencer
Content note: references a fatal accident, suicide, and grief. 

Excerpt
"Husbands" by Melissa DaCosta Brown
Winner of the 2023 Fiction Prize

The Fiddlehead is pleased to announce the finalists of our 2023 Fiction Contest, judged by Jack Wang!

We're excited to announce that Adèle Barclay is the winner of our 2022 Fiction Contest and $2000 prize! Their story Here Be Dragons ISO will be featured in the upcoming Winter issue of The Fiddlehead (FH294).

The Fiddlehead is pleased to announce the finalists of our 2022 Fiction Contest, judged by Chris Benjamin ! The winner of the $2000 contest prize will be announced on January 5 2023 and the winning story will appear in the Winter 2023 issue (294). Thank you to all who entered and congratulations to the finalists!

The delicate interplay between past and present, what we carry with us, what we leave behind, and what others take from us is rendered in pitch-perfect prose in “The Makeweight Piece.” This story is set during a distant war in which the starving and the dying cling to art as prayer. As worship. As a way to define who they once were. So much heart is packed between the lines of a story whose tone is at once tightly focused and expansive that my own heart staggers and cracks open. As a reader I’m dying to be touched and amazed.

The Makeweight Piece by Anne Marie Todkill, 2021 Fiction Contest Winner

Excerpt

We're excited to announce that Anne Marie Todkill is the winner of our 2021 Fiction Contest and $2000 prize! Her story The Makeweight Piece is featured in our Spring issue no. 291, which is available for pre-order now! 

Anne Marie Todkill has published poetry, short fiction, and creative non-fiction in various Canadian literary magazines. Her winning entry in The Malahat Review 2016 Novella Contest was anthologized in Best Canadian Stories 2017. Her first poetry collection, Orion Sweeping (Brick Books), will appear this spring.

Thank you to all who entered the fiction contest and congratulations to the fifteen finalists. And thanks again to our judge Yasuko Thanh!

The Fiddlehead is pleased to announce the finalists of our 2021 Fiction Contest, judged by Yasuko Thanh! The winner of the $2000 contest prize will be announced on March 23 2022 and the winning story will appear in the Spring 2022 issue (291). Thank you to all who entered and congratulations to the finalists!