Kelly Norah Drukker named 2026-27 Susan Jeanne Briscoe Fellowship recipient

Kelly Norah Drukker is the recipient of the 2026-27 Susan Jeanne Briscoe Fellowship Award, a $35,000 prize supporting recent Concordia graduates whose creative practice focuses on writing.

Drukker completed her PhD in Humanities at Concordia in June 2025. A creative writer, oral historian, interdisciplinary scholar and performer, her work explores the intersections of history, intergenerational memory, the Irish diaspora and place.

As the 2026-27 Briscoe Fellow, Drukker will spend the year developing her award-winning research-creation dissertation, Naming the Traces: (Re)Constructing an Irish-Canadian Family Narrative of Emigration, Place-Making, and Return, into a book.

“Receiving this award means that I will be able to take the time I need to write, revise, reflect, and conduct additional research, in order to move Naming the Traces from dissertation to book form,” she says. “Knowing that I will complete my first book of creative nonfiction with this level of creative and financial support behind me has given me a sense of peace and confidence.”

The creative nonfiction project traces four generations of Drukker’s maternal family between County Mayo, Ireland, and Montreal. Drawing on memoir, oral history, archival research and place-based writing, it explores the ways family stories, memories and silences are carried across generations.

The narrative begins with Drukker’s great-grandmother, Norah Davin, who emigrated from Ireland to Montreal in 1928. It follows Norah’s experience as a single mother raising Drukker’s grandmother, Rose, during the Great Depression, as well as the lives of subsequent generations of the family in Montreal.

The project concludes with Drukker’s own return to Ireland in 2022, when she became the first person in her family to visit the village of Shrule in County Mayo since the family’s emigration.

“In writing Naming the Traces, which blends creative nonfiction writing with oral history testimony gathered from my family members, I hope to offer readers a series of windows — into how particular moments in a family’s past and the places they inhabited can be recreated through storytelling, and how places can act as both springboards and repositories for memory,” says Drukker.

“I hope to share how the distance between previous generations’ life-worlds and the present day can occasionally be bridged — in thrilling and unexpected ways — through careful research, listening to family stories, and walking the landscapes they once inhabited.”

Drukker’s work has already received the Award of Distinction in Oral History from Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and was nominated for the Governor General’s Academic Medal in 2025.

During her fellowship year, Drukker plans to expand and revise the manuscript, conduct additional research into the history of the Hôpital de la Miséricorde in Montreal and unmarried motherhood in Montreal and Ireland, and incorporate additional oral history testimony from family interviews.

She will also write an epilogue reflecting on memory and identity, and the role that oral history and creative writing can play in preserving family histories.

Established in memory of the late writer and artist Susan Jeanne Briscoe, the fellowship is awarded competitively based on academic merit to recent Concordia graduates who have completed an MA, MFA or PhD. Eligible programs include Studio Arts, the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Creative Writing, the Humanities PhD (HUMA) and Individualized Programs (INDI).

The next call for applications for the Susan Jeanne Briscoe Fellowship is expected to open in April 2027.

Discover more about Concordia’s PhD in Humanities