For over half a century, The Malahat Review has been a cornerstone of Canada’s literary landscape. Founded in 1967 and published quarterly by the University of Victoria, the journal is renowned for publishing exceptional poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction by both Canadian and international writers. With a long history of championing literary excellence and supporting both emerging and established voices, The Malahat Review plays a key role in shaping contemporary literature.
Work first published in The Malahat Review has gone on to earn 19 gold and 13 silver medals at the National Magazine Awards, along with 65 honourable mentions. The journal has been named Magazine of the Year three times by the Western Magazine Awards, and its contributors have received major accolades, including the Writers’ Trust / McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize (eight times), the Pushcart Prize, and the PEN/O. Henry Prize. With four annual contests and a longstanding commitment to literary innovation and inclusion, The Malahat Review continues to provide a platform for bold, original writing. Most recently, at the 2025 National Magazine Awards, the journal received Honourable Mentions in the Personal Journalism category for Lanterns by Marcel Goh and The Pathfinder by Aldyn Chwelos.
BC Creates interviewed the magazine’s Editor Iain Higgins to explore what defines The Malahat Review today: its evolving editorial direction, its embrace of literary risk and range, and the thoughtful process behind curating each issue. From the kinds of submissions that stand out to the magazine’s investment in mentorship, this conversation offers a behind-the-scenes look at how one of Canada’s most respected journals remains a dynamic presence in the literary world.
Q&A with Iain Higgins, Editor, The Malahat Review
How would you describe the editorial vision of The Malahat Review today, and how has that evolved over time?
The Malahat Review publishes contemporary poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, mostly by Canadian authors, regardless of where they live, but also includes work by international authors (up to about 20 percent annually). The magazine is committed to publishing work by emerging as well as established writers and by writers who are as diverse as the country’s population is, especially those writers who historically would not have had equal access to publication. Variety—of subject matter, of form and style, of length—is central to the magazine’s editorial vision. In recent years, we have published everything from rhymed sonnet sequences to sonic or algorithmic poetic experiments that probe the limits of sense, from extended realistic narratives to compact speculative fiction, from personal memoirs to collaged documentary-commentary. Not quite something for everyone certainly, but much for many. Ideally, every issue will contain something surprising to some of our readers, something unexpected, something that expands their and our sense of what literature can do. Since the magazine’s founding in 1967, every editor has, I think, shared the basic vision of publishing compelling, representative, contemporary writing.
Do you think there’s a “Malahat” style—or does the magazine resist any fixed aesthetic?
The magazine aims to be varied and eclectic, but to anyone looking in from a distance, it may well seem as if there is a “Malahat” style, and not only because the magazine’s longstanding editorial emphasis on literary writing broadly defined has always excluded journalism and feature writing, genre fiction as such, and mass-market work generally (all of which have their own forums, place, and value in a lively creative world). If there is a “Malahat” style, though, it would also partly result from what art historians would call a “period style”: that is, the broadly shared aesthetic and thematic concerns that most artists or writers working at a certain time will have, along with the stylistic and formal modes available to them, and their sense of what kind of work can be made or is needed. If someone were to read a set of issues of this or any other Canadian literary magazine from, say, the late 60s and early 70s, they would see most of them inhabiting broad common ground, even if the style of habitation might vary somewhat from one periodical to the next. Acknowledging these factors—those of being a small literary magazine in a given place and time—I would say that the magazine aims across each annual set of four issues to gives its readers a sense of the range of varied work that writers are currently making and the kinds of subjects that currently interest them. If the writing shines, we’re likely to be interested in it.
What qualities do you look for in a piece of writing when considering it for publication?
The magazine’s three editorial boards are looking for work that feels fresh, vital, contemporary, that will speak in a compelling way to at least some of our readers (who can be found everywhere across the country and who represent quite a wide range of ages). If the subject is familiar—and there’s no reason why it can’t be—then the approach, the writing, should be offering something less familiar, unexpected even, thus enticing readers to spend time with it. Quiet, subtle work interests us just as much as work crackling with verbal or other energy. Readers’ moods vary, so the writing can as well. The world is multifarious, and we are interested in seeing its multifariousness in a variety of literary forms. From the choice of words through the shape of sentences to the arc of thought or plot or feeling, we are looking for writing that is well considered, that rewards attention, that respects its subjects and its readers, including by offering them work that is challenging.
What’s your process for curating each issue? Do you build around themes, voices, or something else entirely?
Each issue can be thought of as a set of snapshots or samplings of current writing, and we aim across the annual run of four issues to offer readers work that represents a wide range of concerns, forms, styles, even lengths, by a wide range of writers both emerging and established, from all different parts of the country and from different backgrounds. The magazine has sometimes published special theme issues, but in recent years the nature and shape of each issue has mostly emerged organically out of the submissions themselves. Typically, for each issue, we are considering submissions that have come in over the last two to six months, and as we encounter writing that catches our interest and attention, we start to see ways in which it might come together: on one occasion, the pieces might be curated around different perspectives on a given subject or set of subjects; on another occasion, they might be curated around a principle of maximal contrast (of style, form, mood, subject, etc.). Much depends on what emerges as compelling from recent submissions. Likewise, if, for a given issue, we consider the submissions in a one or another genre to be more engaging, we will accept more work in that genre, so that each issue will have a variable proportion of each of the three genres. Once the boards have made their selections, I as editor try to lay the issue out as a whole so that the works it contains are in conversation with one another, both locally and at a distance, both overtly and implicitly. Ideally, each issue will differ from the previous one, not only in the amount of space given to each genre, but also in the concerns, forms, and styles of the different works included. At the end of the year, the four sets of snapshots will, we hope, together form a kind of a kaleidoscopic view of engaging current Canadian writing.
Is there a theme you’ve always wanted to dedicate an issue to, but haven’t yet had the opportunity to pursue?
There are several, but above all an issue with storytelling and other literary work in some of the many languages spoken in Canada, starting with the rich and varied Indigenous languages. If every language and every culture is a kind of cosmos (or sets of them), wouldn’t it be a world-expanding experience to read and hear more from the hearts and minds given expression beyond English alone?
What role does mentorship play in your work as an editor?
Mentorship is everywhere, I think, in virtually every aspect of the magazine’s production as I experience it, and it seems to me a necessarily reciprocal activity, with both participants benefitting from the exchange. The Managing Editor, L’Amour Lisik, and I are constantly learning things from each other as we see each issue into print and consider which authors to interview or which work to submit to something like the National Magazine Awards or the Journey Prize. Our day-to-day work necessarily involves mutual mentorship therefore. Likewise, the contributions of the editorial boards (which include student interns) as they read, respond to, and discuss submissions constitute a kind of mentorship for me (as I hope it does for them). My editorial work with individual authors in seeking to help make their words shine on the page involves what I hope is a beneficial exchange between writer and (early) reader. I certainly learn from it as an editor. Even the apparently trivial question of whether to remove or add, say, a comma can be instructive for both writer and editor, though obviously editing concerns more than punctuation. Finally, though it’s often forgotten, the work done with the designer and the printer also involves mutual teaching, since again the goal is do justice to the work being laid out and printed for circulation in the world. As an editor, one is always learning.
How do you keep your editorial vision fresh issue after issue? What fuels your inspiration as an editor?
I work with a wonderful Managing Editor and three amazing editorial boards, whose members bring such energy, intelligence, generosity, and openminded-ness to their work that it’s hard not to be inspired by their desire to see engaging writing make its way out into the world. And the same goes for the writers who submit their work. Yes, there’s an awful lot to read, and some days one just feels tired, but then suddenly you happen on a run of submissions that get you excited again with their energy, their verbal vitality, their vision, their insights, their risk-taking … The variety and the range of human inventiveness and human creativity remain inspiring, and it’s a privilege to help bring some small part of it into the world.
What has surprised you the most since becoming editor of The Malahat Review?
Probably the quality as well as the amount of work submitted: we receive several thousand of submissions annually and a surprisingly large number of them are well enough made and well enough written. That makes the work of choosing hard.
What, in your view, continues to make literature vital and meaningful, especially in the context of contemporary reading habits?
We often forget that reading is a highly specialized skill—or set of skills, really—and that there are different kinds of reading, depending on what we’re reading and why. Texts require a different kind of engagement from short stories, say. We are always still learning to read, and our reading always involves some form of exchange, whereby we offer attention to words that have been offered to us (the same is true for oral work, except that embodied ears and mouths now join company with the eyes). With literary reading, it’s especially about the quality of the attention that we give to something, so as to enjoy, enrich, and benefit from what is being offered to us. We read literary writing for various reasons, but chief amongst them might be the desire, even the need, to enter emotionally and intellectually into other forms of reality than the ones we inhabit on a daily basis, to entertain other perspectives on reality, ourselves, and our place in the worlds around us, but also equally to encounter ourselves and our worlds as seen and affirmed by others (whether others like or us or different from us), and variously to lose, find, and extend ourselves as beings in those worlds. We read literature for all sorts of reasons, in other words. We now do so of course in a very different media environment not only from that in which literature emerged millennia ago, but even from that of two decades ago. In the world of the smart phone and the pixelated screen generally, we have almost unlimited access to multi-media experience ranging from the most trivial to the most sublime and the most horrific. Literary reading offers a contrast to that on-demand digital universe and provides a different kind of immersive experience, one that might be slower, more inward, more contemplative, more dialogic … What continues to make literature vital and meaningful, then (and here finally I get around to answering the question as posed), is its capacity to engage our hearts and minds in ways that screens don’t. The most compelling writers take full advantage of what only language can do in speaking their hearts and minds to their readers.
Lastly, what advice would you offer to writers submitting to literary magazines like The Malahat Review for the first time?
Read the magazine’s submission guidelines so that you know you are submitting eligible work. Have a look at some recent issues of the magazine in question to see whether your writing, by virtue of its concerns and form and style, might likewise appeal to its editorial board(s). Send your best work and make sure it’s clean (turn off “track changes”!). Recognize that the odds of magazine publication are long for most of us, so you’ll need to be persistent as well as clear about your choice of magazine(s). The Malahat Review publishes some 360 printed pages of literary writing annually—comprising some dozen or so pieces of fiction, some dozen or so pieces of creative nonfiction, and a variable number of poems—chosen from some 4000 or more submissions (open and contest). Some of the work chosen for publication comes from new or emerging writers, so long odds are not necessarily impossible odds.
Learn more about The Malahat Review on their website. Order Issue 230 and browse past issues to discover the range of work they publish, or check out their submission guidelines for information on sending your work to the journal. The Malahat Review also runs four annual contests in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, each offering prizes for both emerging and established writers.
