Elamin Abdelmahmoud

Photo Credit: CBC

Writer, cultural commentator and broadcaster Elamin Abdelmahmoud is the winner of the 2025 Max Wyman Award for Critical Writing. Abdelmahmoud is the host of CBC Radio’s weekday morning culture magazine, Commotion and a former culture writer for BuzzFeed magazine. His articles on culture and politics have been published in The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, Chatelaine, Maclean’s and Rolling Stone and his first book, Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces, was a national bestseller and a New York Times notable book of the year.

The award was presented in October live on-stage at the conclusion of a Vancouver Writers Fest panel discussion of Abdelmahmoud’s latest publication, Elbows Up! Canadian Voices of Resilience and Resistance, a collection of essays by notable Canadian writers on the implications of the Canada-U.S. trade war.

Abdelmahmoud’s selection as this year’s laureate marks the award’s transition to an all-Canada prize, after eight years in which its focus was on B.C. writers.

Award founder Yosef Wosk commented:

The expansion of the scope of this award from provincial to national was anticipated from its launch … It is in part a response to the influence of social media on the traditional role of the critic and cultural commentator. It also reflects the changing nature of artistic creativity itself, as traditional boundaries between artistic disciplines dissolve into a borderless, cross-referential wonderland of creative expression.

“Equally important is the fact that the need to foster and celebrate the Canadian cultural identity has taken on a fresh urgency in this Elbows Up era.

“Elamin Abdelmahmoud is the ideal embodiment of these concerns. He gives meaning and context to the bubbling cauldron of Canadian creativity in all its manifestations, managing the difficult balance between what we used to call high-brow and low-brow culture with aplomb, equally comfortable talking about Waiting for Godot or Taylor Swift. He’s smart and funny and engaged and vulnerable—an informed inquirer, an introducer of enthusiasms.

“That is what this award has always wished to honour. I am delighted that he has agreed to receive this year’s award, and am most grateful to Leslie Hurtig and the Vancouver Writers Fest for hosting the presentation.”

The selection panel for the 2025 prize consisted of former Georgia Straight editor Charles Campbell, Yosef Wosk and Max Wyman. The panel’s citation reads:

Arts critics regularly say they want their work to be the beginning of a conversation, not the end of it. Only occasionally do they really mean it. Too often they just deliver their opinion
from a pedestal. The internet hobbled those old-school arts critics when it insisted on commentary as conversation.

“Elamin Abdelmahmoud came of age as new rules were taking shape. His brilliance is partly in his uncertainty as he works through an idea, both as a writer and as the host of CBC Radio’s pop culture show Commotion. But his genius is also in his eye for telling detail, and his sense of a good story, where change is the absolutely necessary element.”

Max Wyman with Elamin Abdelmahmoud. Photo credit: Margaret Brown

“On my best days, I like to think of the work of criticism and cultural commentary as the work of issuing invitations — we’re always inviting someone (ourselves included) to a deeper reading, an unseen connection, a richer context. It’s a privilege to do this work, and it’s a great gift to receive this recognition.”

Elamin Abdelmahmoud