Awards Judges

English writing categories

Chuka Ejeckam
Chuka Ejeckam is a writer and researcher based in Toronto. The son of Igbo immigrants to Canada, he was born and grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His academic work has focused on domestic and global inequity and inequality, reparations drug policy, structural racism, and labour. He has been published in *The Globe and Mail, Macleans, rabble.ca , Canadian Diversity*, and he has contributed to multiple academic articles and book chapters. His graduate thesis, now being developed into a larger work, highlights and opposes the explicitly racist foundations of drug prohibition, and the means by which drug policy enforcement and the US-led War on Drugs have advanced Western, primarily US-based neoliberal capitalist and imperialist interests, creating incalculable harm in death, displacement, and desperation. Chuka has also written and spoken against police budgets and brutality, Canadian arms manufacturing and sales, and about the need for Western countries to pay reparations for colonisation and climate change, and to resettle climate refugees. Chuka previously worked in the labour movement in British Columbia.