A Filipino writer from Calgary has won the prestigious RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers for his poetry titled “Psalmody for the Estranged”.
“I was in shock,” Renato Gandia said when his name was announced as the winner of the poetry contest—with a $10,000 prize—at a gala held in Toronto, Ont. at the Royal Conservatory of Music on Monday, June 1, 2026.
“I didn’t go up the stage right away because I couldn’t believe it,” he said.
He said he could barely read his speech because he was crying.
This is the first time a Filipino has won the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, supported by RBC since 2007.
The prize helps promising unpublished Canadian writers launch their careers through three $10,000 prizes in poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction.
In addition to publication opportunities and networking events in Toronto, finalists receive professional exposure, while winners gain personalized mentorship.
The program also provides webinars on writing craft and the publishing industry, supporting emerging writers through skills development, education, and audience-building opportunities.
A Career in Writing
Gandia, 55, moved to Canada from Quezon province in the Philippines in 1997 to attend Newman Theological College, where he finished his Masters of Divinity.
“I was studying to become a priest, but obviously that didn’t turn out. Instead, I became a journalist,” he said.
Gandia has worked at various media outlets such as the Edmonton Sun, Calgary Sun, Fort McMurray Today, and CityNews Calgary Television.
He then shifted to working in communications as a press secretary, as a media relations specialist in the oil industry, and a brand and marketing specialist.
He currently works as a media relations specialist at Health Sciences Association of Alberta.
Gandia, who has dabbled in creative writing through his journalism career, didn’t really focus on poetry until recently.
“Poetry is fairly new to me. I’ve only been writing poetry since late 2024,” he said.
Gandia said he decided to enter the contest because of the opportunity to develop his writing skills, talent and to gain exposure to the literary world in Canada.
He has entered many contests for his writing over the years, and has won various awards such as the 2025 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize, Fiction Contest (Milk Bag Magazine), and the Chinook Blast at The Confluence Poetry Event.
Personal Mission
As Gandia reflected on his win, he felt gratified that he was able to put Tagalog words into his poems: words like sinigang and adobo.
“There’s (now going to be) a poetry collection with Tagalog words. To think that an award-giving body has honoured poems that have Tagalog words in them—that’s the prize for me.”
He didn’t translate the Tagalog words in his poems, trusting that the readers will understand, or seek to understand, the meaning of the words.
“I braided them seamlessly into the pieces that I wrote. That was a personal mission for me as a writer.”
Advice to Filipino writers
When asked what advice he would give other aspiring Filipino writers, Gandia has this to say:
Have patience, always keep writing, and believe in yourself.
“When stories come from the heart, they come from hard work, they come from the psyche, they come from within.
“(They’re) not just something that we picked up along the way, but something that we nurtured, something that was marinating in our own experiences as people who came to this country to find a place here.”
Once written, these stories will touch other people’s lives and will resonate within them, Gandia said.
“Be proud of our heritage,” he said.
Poem Excerpt
On summer evenings
he grills pork loin on the deck
while I clip spinach for sinigang.
The scent unsettles the air,
and somewhere behind the fences
someone is watching,
trying to name what doesn’t fit.
