Interview with 2025 MFP Winner, Hannah Berger

Hannah Berger

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Read our interview with Hannah Berger, winner of the 2025 Montreal Fiction Prize, in which she discusses the experience of winning the prize, the relationship between her visual art and writing, and the significance of leaving space for readers to make connections.

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Yolk began as an electric conversation around a picnic table in Saint Henri Square.
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Our scruffy pioneer and present prose editor had previously approached each of us with an idea, a vision: We would establish our own literary magazine in Montreal. And so it was, or so it would be. After that original encounter, eight individuals devoted to the word resolved that they would gather bi-weekly, on Sundays, and bring something new into this busy, manic world—something that might slow its spin down somewhat and cause its patronage to say: “You know what, it ain’t so bad, is it, Susan?”

We are undergraduate, graduate, and graduated students of writing. Some of us learn our craft formally from accomplished authors in seminar courses, and some of us learn by looking out the window of the world and onto the streets that sing below. Some of us learn from screaming squirrels, old curtains, departed grandfathers, and bowel movements. We learn from old lovers, long winters, imperfect mothers, and from the deep internet where a musical genius remains entombed.

Yolk is cold floors on Sabbath mornings, home-brewed ginger beer in the endless afternoon, and downpours of French-pressed coffee in assorted artisanal mugs. Our first official gathering was scheduled for a duration of two hours; most of us remained for six, departing only to attend to the summons of our own beckoning realities. Together, with time suspended, we talked endlessly of contributing something to disrupt Montreal’s literary ecosystem. Something unparalleled, something true.

But what? There was nothing to discuss. There was everything to discuss.

We volunteer our time, hounding some elusive beast composed of combustible words and works. We are hopeful, truly hopeful, that we can give something new, a new way, a new light, and that if we cannot, we might at least uphold the traditions of our predecessors, cast star-wide nets to capture their echoes. We are a thousand decisions. We are a sanctuary for the orphaned word, the solitary writer, the cereal-eating artist who yearns for company, for the comfort of a like mind; we sit together with them at foggy dawn, it rains a baptism, with our arms and hands intertwined, we form an umbrella—underneath, they scribble madly, the perfect picture.

Yolk in no way presumes to be superior to its contemporaries, but its contemporaries should not presume yolk to be anything other than loud—quite, quite loud. We are yippidy jazzed to address the oh-so-technicolorful magnificence of the human experience, but we are prepared also to address the ugliness, to stare at its wet, hairy snout and into its square depth and to roar in return at the things that yearn to devour our skin, beset our ethos, and dig graves in our own backyards.

There’s so much to say, there’s so much we don’t know, but together, with you, we can placate that ignorance, render it peaceful, tolerable, and perhaps even, fucking beautiful.

And Susan says, “Amen.”

Hannah Berger's short story "A Swelling" was awarded the 2025 Montreal Fiction Prize, as judged by Billy Ray-Belcourt. Yolk caught up with Hannah in anticipation of the 2026 Montreal Fiction Prize, which is judged by Heather O'Neill and open for submissions until June 30th. Full submission details can be found on our website.

You can read "A Swelling" on our Digital Publication.

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  1. What did winning the Montreal Fiction Prize mean to you?

“Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought…”* When you’re an artist who is trying to make rent from art, you have to spend a heroic amount of time filling out Google forms. You have to get rejected a lot. It’s the greatest privilege of my life to get to write and make art, but it can also feel lonely and punishing because of how the world is. I’d like to think I could survive at the bottom of the ocean for a thousand years, like whatever is probably living down there. But awards like these are great encouragement: more eyes on my work and the message that the things I’m making are resonating. After winning the prize, my story was nominated for a National Magazine Award and selected for the 2027 Best Canadian Stories anthology. None of that would have happened without this."

  1. Billy-Ray Belcourt said, “I loved the strange language of “A Swelling,” how it felt both from another time and that it was approaching the contemporary.” What was it like having Belcourt read your work?

"It was an honour that felt completely unlikely, unimaginable, which I still can’t really wrap my head around. The fact that this brilliant poet whose work I’ve respected for so long would take the time to read my work, to think about it and have this response which affirms what I was trying to do. It still totally bowls me over"

  1. You’re also a visual artist. Do you see your writing and visual arts as entirely separate crafts, or do they tend to inform each other?

"I started writing at a time when my full-time job and night school prevented me from being able to go work on visual art at my studio. At first, the two felt very distinct, only similar because they satisfied the same impulse. But then I’ll read one of my stories from that time, and find that I’ve always had the same priorities in everything I do. If I compare making a drawing to writing a story, I can say that each requires an extreme economy of space, of lines. I always want to leave gaps, and to have the thing feel very new and very old at once, if I’m lucky."

  1. Your story opens with the line, “Hi again. I get stuck in circles revising the story for you.” Does this reflect your own creative process at all?

"Sure, who knows when to stop editing? That line was also about how memory works, these cycles of revision that get you through time. My best friend Hannah always says that it’s so easy to write a letter, but so impossible to send it."

  1. What inspired the epistolary form?

"As a reader, I hate when a story has too much exposition. To my mind it should be treated like blending vegetables into a picky child’s dinner. Whenever I read other people’s mail (in an antique store or archive, not at "Canada Post") I’m drawn in by the way people talk around events which both correspondents are aware of, and so don’t need to be described in the same detail as they would be in literature. People are smart, and can put things together themselves. The story also expresses the thrill of reading other people’s mail, so I thought the frame of it should allow the reader to share in that joy"

  1. What inspired your short story, “A Swelling?”

"The landscape of Southwestern Ontario, which really does look like a stamped-in cardboard box, is the landscape of my dreams. It’s lumpy and drab but with birds and wetlands, and tall, austere churches. I’ve always had an interest in finding old local letters or photographs and filling in certain gaps, making new ones elsewhere. It’s the same with the old yellow brick houses off backroads which all have barns that look bombed out. "A Swelling" didn’t begin with any one photograph or letter, but with those great houses and barns by the highway. And I was listening to the song “I Was a Stranger” by Smog a lot."

  1. What are you working on now?

"I’m beginning to experiment with more hybrid work, stories with drawings and photographs in them and the like. I’m also just looking forward to collaborating on projects this summer. All my best work has come from collaborating with people I care about. Mostly, though, I want to do more readings, in and out of Montreal. So if anyone has read this far and is planning that sort of thing, please write me a note!"

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*Opening words from the best short story ever written, Prizes by Janet Frame.

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Additional reading

Fiction
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February 15, 2022

2025 MFP: A Swelling

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Yolk acknowledges that our work in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal takes place on the unceded Indigenous lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka/Mohawk Nation. Tiohtià:ke is known as a gathering place for many First Nations, and we recognize the Kanien’kehá:ka as custodians of the lands on which we gather.

Yolk warmly acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts,  Conseil des arts de Montréal, and the English Language Arts Network’s Trellis Micro-grant project, funded by The Department of Canadian Heritage’s Official Languages Support Programs.