WINNER OF THE 2025 TORONTO BOOK AWARD

One of CBC Books’s Best Canadian Nonfiction Books of 2025

One of the Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2025

One of CBC Books’s Canadian books you should be reading in May 2025

One of CBC Books’s Canadian nonfiction books to read in spring 2025

‘Encampment often turns the pulpit over to others – giving voice to the citizens, custodians, and seers who create and re-create home.’ – Aviva Rubin, Room Magazine

“Encampment is the book for anyone who has ever looked at an unhoused settlement and wondered – how does this happen in a country as wealthy as Canada, in a city as vibrant and seemingly compassionate as Toronto? Encampment is the chronicle of an unhoused community on the doorstep of St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Anglican Church in Kensington Market. Maggie Helwig, the church pastor, becomes a champion of the encampment in her midst and details in exquisite prose the plight of the individuals who make up this unhoused community. It’s a difficult book to put down once you start reading and impossible to forget once you finish. Helwig’s exceptional storytelling compels us to care. You will never look at an unhoused community the same way again.” – 2025 Toronto Book Awards Jury Citation

“Encampment represents an important contribution to literature regarding homelessness.” – James Hughes, Literary Review of Canada

“In Encampment, Helwig casts an unapologetic gaze at how our government and society fail to provide homeless people with the basic necessities of life, spotlighting the beliefs and rationalizations that lead to these failures, and the dire implications for the health and well-being of unhoused people.” – Christina Palassio, The Philanthropist Journal

“Encampment shines a light on injustice, but does not easily assign labels of hero or villain. . . [R]equired reading for anyone with a home who hopes to understand the lives of the many who do not.” – Shawn Syms, Quill & Quire

“[I]t’s this refusal to see any difference between neighbours, regardless of their housing, that makes Helwig’s voice and vision so extraordinary, and what makes Encampment such a necessary, clarifying, and life-changing read for so many of us right now.” – Kerry Clare, Pickle Me This

“In crystalline prose, [Encampment] sheds light on not only the struggles of the unhoused but the heartlessness of a society that would rather not see them at all.”  – Publishers Weekly, ★ STARRED Review

“Helwig is a natural storyteller who effortlessly weaves the various threads of her worlds into a rich, compelling tapestry. She is a candid and surprisingly non-judgmental writer. She also has a wonderfully dry sense of humour with an eye for the comical and absurd – a precious asset for a book such as this.” – Stuart Mann, The Anglican

“It’s like the start of a bad joke: an Anglican priest walks into a homeless encampment. Except it’s her churchyard the encampment is in, and the people who live there become her community. She experiences life with them, grieves with them when a friend is lost or a temporary dwelling is uprooted yet again; she administers Narcan and stands with them before the Claw the city uses to tear down their tents. She fights with them, and in doing so invites us to look unflinchingly at a population many of us would prefer to ignore. These people are real, the systems that keep them on the streets are deeply rooted, and it is important for us to see, to bear witness, to engage.” – Anneka Weicht, Changing Hands Bookstore

“Helwig is a priest, human rights activist, poet, caregiver, friend, mother, Mother. And she is, most admirably, a reader—a reader of sacred texts, yes, but also a reader of a city, of a neighbourhood, of bureaucracy, of poetry, of law by turns incensing and nonsensical, and of a community frequently deemed illegible or illegitimate in their living because the living looks different. With this book, Helwig maps a space for difference. Encampment enacts the gesture of a hand reaching out to meet another, of a question being formed, and of a need—however difficult to translate its utterance—that is listened to with respect and responded to with attention. Reader to reader, Helwig asks us: How might we better live together?” – Claire Foster, Type Books

“Helwig’s Encampment is an urgent call for compassion, part memoir, part homily. In eloquent prose it takes us on Helwig’s journey as Anglican priest and activist into complex engagement with city staff, lawyers, politicians, and the unhoused community she works tirelessly to learn from and assist.” – Martha Baillie, There is No Blue

“If you have seen a homeless person or an encampment and wondered who, why, or how, this is the book for you. Maggie Helwig’s storytelling from the front lines of Toronto’s housing tragedy is vivid, vital and profoundly human.” – Shawn Micallef, Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto