Leila Marshy is a Montrealer of Palestinian-Newfoundland heritage. Her stories and poetry have been published in literary journals and anthologies in Canada and the United States. Marshy became the fiction editor at Baraka Books in the summer of 2024. She edited Razing Palestine: Punishing Solidarity and Dissent in Canada (Baraka Books, 2025).
Fiction (Short stories)
My Thievery of the People: Stories
Montreal: Baraka Books, 2025.
e-book (Access restricted to members of the university community)
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
From the highways of Cairo to the outports of Newfoundland, the soul-crushing cubicles of city work and the deceptive perils of the Quebec countryside, these brilliant short stories lay bare the workings of power and the small acts of both courage and compromise by which those on the margins defy them.
Marshy’s distinctive style and untamed strength guides the reader in an electrifying high-wire act through the inner lives of refugees, queers in love and grief, wives, workers, and so many others fighting their way out from under.
Awards and Honours
2025 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Literary Award for Fiction (Quebec Writers’ Federation)(Finalist)
Fiction
The Philistine
Montreal: Linda Leith Publishing, 2018.
PS8626 .A76755 P55 2018
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Nadia Eid doesn’t know it yet, but she’s about to change her life. It’s the end of the ‘80s and she hasn’t seen her Palestinian father since he left Montreal years ago to take a job in Egypt, promising to bring her with him.
But now she’s twenty-five and he’s missing in action, so she takes matters into her own hands. Booking a short vacation from her boring job and Québecois boyfriend, she calls her father from the Nile Hilton in downtown Cairo. But nothing goes as planned and, stumbling around, Nadia wanders into an art gallery where she meets Manal, a young Egyptian artist who becomes first her guide and then her lover.
Through this unexpected relationship, Nadia rediscovers her roots, her language, and her ambitions, as her father demonstrates the unavoidable destiny of becoming a Philistine – the Arabic word for Palestinian. With Manal’s career poised to take off and her father’s secret life revealed, the First Intifada erupts across the border.
Links
Leila Marshy profile — Quebec Writers’ Federation
Murat-Ingles, Léa. “Resistance is an Artful Thief.” Interview in Montreal Review of Books, March 12, 2025.
Publisher Baraka Books
Publisher Linda Leith Publishing