Five is a lucky number for a group of emerging authors and poets who will each receive $5,000 through a one-time initiative from the Writers’ Trust of Canada.

Earlier this year, the Writers’ Trust received $25,000 in funding through the RBC Emerging Artists Project, which pitted six arts organizations against each other in an online poll.

The Five x Five project splits the full proceeds between the authors and poets, who were selected by former Writers’ Trust award honorees.

The five recipients are:

Linda Besner, selected by Ken Babstock
Besner is the author of 2011’s The Id Kid (Véhicule Press), which was named one of the National Post’s best poetry books of the year.

Megan Gail Coles, selected by Michael Crummey
Coles is a St. John’s playwright and fiction writer whose debut story collection, Eating Habits of the Chronically Lonesome (Killick Press), won the 2014 BMO Winterset Award and the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award.

Ghalib Islam, selected by Madeleine Thien
Islam has a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Toronto, where he was mentored by Margaret Atwood. In 2014, he published his debut novel, Fire in the Unnameable Country, with Hamish Hamilton Canada.

Eliza Robertson, selected by Joseph Boyden
Eliza Robertson’s stories have been shortlisted for the Journey Prize and CBC Short Story Prize. In 2013, her story “We Walked On Water” co-won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her first collection, Wallflowers, was published in 2014 by Hamish Hamilton Canada and Bloomsbury UK.

Melanie Siebert, selected by Esi Edugyan
A Victoria-based poet, Siebert’s first collection, Deepwater Vee (McClelland & Stewart), was shortlisted for a 2010 Governor General’s Literary Award.