Maggie Helwig

• Honorific Prefix — The Reverend Canon • Name — Maggie Helwig • Born — 1961 • Birthplace — Wallasey, England • Education — * Trent University • Trinity College, Toronto • Occupation — * Cleric • novelist • poet • social activist • Parents — David Helwig

Her early education was at Kingston Collegiate and Vocational Institute in Kingston, Ontario, graduating in 1979, then at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, where she graduated with honours with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1983. After reading for a Master of Divinity degree and serving as co-Head of Divinity at Trinity College, Toronto, she was ordained to the transitional diaconate in the Anglican Church of Canada at St. Paul's, Bloor Street, Toronto on 1 May 2011, and subsequently to the priesthood on 22 January 2012. On 27 November 2021, she was appointed an honorary Canon of St James' Cathedral, Toronto.

Helwig has been involved in social activist groups such as TAPOL, the East Timor Alert Network, and the International Federation for East Timor which campaigned against the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. She has also worked with the Women in Black network, particularly during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. She was also a well known advocate for Toronto's branch of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and was one of three clergy from different denominations ticketed for setting up a chapel at the Occupy Toronto "re-occupation" camp on May 1, 2012. In 2022, on behalf of the Church of Saint Stephen-in-the-Fields, Helwig filed an interlocutory injunction request to prohibit the City of Toronto from removing a homeless encampment located alongside the Church on City of Toronto property. This request was denied by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, and the encampment was partially removed by the City in 2023. Helwig wrote her 2025 book Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community, winner of the 2025 Toronto Book Award, on this topic. The remainder of the encampment survived in a precarious situation in the following years, facing a series of violation notices from the City. It was forcibly cleared by the City in October 2025 following an order from Toronto Fire Services. In 2026, she won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community.

Born in the United Kingdom, Helwig is the daughter of prominent Canadian writer David Helwig and theatre director and actor Nancy Helwig of Kingston, Ontario. She is married to editor Ken Simons and has one daughter.

• Walking Through Fire, 1981 • Tongues of Men and Angels (Oberon Press, 1985) • Eden, 1987 • Because the Gunman, 1987 • Talking Prophet Blues (Quarry Press, 1989) • Graffiti for J.J. Harper, 1991 • Eating Glass, 1994 • The City on Wednesday, 1996 • One Building In the Earth: New and Selected Poems (2002)

• Gravity Lets You Down, 1997 (short fiction) • Where She Was Standing, 2001 • Between Mountains (2004) • Girls Fall Down, 2008

• Apocalypse Jazz (1993) • Real Bodies, 2002

• Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community (2025) • Instructions for the End of the World: Homilies of Comfort and Resistance (2026)