Carly Lewis, 2023 Magazine Winner

Carly Lewis has been a freelance journalist since 2012. Her work has appeared at The New York Times, Wired, the Globe and Mail, New York Magazine, Elle, The Walrus, Maisonneuve, The Atlantic, Hazlitt, The Guardian and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor.

She serves annually as a judge for the National Magazine Awards and has also worked as a contract lecturer at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Journalism.

Much of her work focuses on gender-based violence and sexual assault. In Wired, she wrote about how court judges’ lack of social media knowledge disadvantages complainants in sexual assault cases, as so many cases now involve social media communications.

She has also written about restorative justice and extrajudicial resolutions, how survivors of sexual assault find pleasure in sex again, new laws that criminalize the act of “stealthing” and the many efforts made in Canada’s arts and culture spaces to eradicate sexual violence.

Carly's winning submission was her article "A Deadly Love", published in the July 2023 edition of Maclean’s Magazine. It's the tragic tale of a woman who spent years building an online romance with a young Englishman. Months after they met in person, he killed her - and her family learned of his dark past.  The story ultimately asks whether Canada should implement federal domestic violence disclosure laws or whether there can be another way, in the quest to reverse the growing number of femicide deaths in Canada.

Carly completed her Master’s of Journalism degree in 2012.