The debut novel of UBC’s School of Creative Writing Adjunct Professor Loghan Paylor, The Cure for Drowning, has been crowned as the one book that all Canadians should read in CBC’s battle-of-the-books contest.
“I was absolutely stunned by the news, and it still doesn’t feel quite real,” said Paylor, “I didn’t listen to the debates live, but so many people texted me live updates that I feel as though I watched it anyway!”
Paylor graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from UBC in 2020 and joined the School of Creative Writing as a teaching faculty member in January 2026. Their now-nationally bestselling novel was also longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book.
Musician and author Tegan Quin, who championed the book in the four-round CBC Radio One contest, described the historical fiction combined with magical realism as “opening eyes and hearts.”
Set in a small Ontario town, The Cure for Drowning follows a pair of queer and non-binary characters navigating love, identity, and societal expectations, after a love triangle—and, subsequently, the Second World War—tear them apart.
The story idea emerged from Paylor’s own quest for belonging. They once worked at a heritage reenactment site in B.C. Being the only openly transgender person on staff had led to some complicated, and sometimes, unpleasant interactions with visitors. Often feeling erased from the narrative the site was telling about history, Paylor searched long and hard through archives to find any quantitative evidence that people like them had existed in the past.
When Paylor was promoting The Cure for Drowning, messages poured in from readers across the country telling the novelist that the book was the first place they had seen someone like them reflected in history, or how it had helped them understand their non-binary child or grandchild. One library event Paylor attended even became an excited “family affair” and a baby’s first, when a queer couple brought their newborn and the child’s grandmother along.
Paylor believes books have the power to build bridges—the theme of this year’s Canada Reads—because stories let us immerse ourselves in others’ life experiences, and help us feel joy, fear, hope, grief, and celebration as a collective.
“Reading fiction is one of the most effective ways to build empathy for other people. So much of hatred and bigotry is the result of fear, and we fear what we don’t understand,” said Paylor. “This is one reason why filling our reading lists, book club picks and libraries with diverse voices is more important than ever, because it translates an unknown into a familiar, intimate relationship, and helps us expand our theory of mind.”
“I would hope that by reading my book, readers come away with an understanding that we all struggle in some way with the labels and boxes that society ascribes to us, and recognize that we have more in common than we realize.”
