Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community (Paperback or Softback)

WINNER OF THE 2025 TORONTO BOOK AWARD

"Striking, elegant." – Publishers Weekly, ★ STARRED Review

An activist priest provides sanctuary for an encampment of unhoused people in her churchyard

The housing crisis plaguing major urban centres has sent countless people into the streets. In spring 2022, some of them found their way to the yard beside the Anglican church in Toronto’s Kensington Market, where Maggie Helwig is the priest. They pitched tents, formed an encampment, and settled in. Known as an outspoken social justice activist, Helwig has spent the last three years getting to know the residents and fighting tooth and nail to allow them to stay, battling various authorities that want to clear the yard and keep the results of the housing crisis out of sight and out of mind. 

Encampment tells the story of Helwig’s life-long activism as preparation for her fight to keep her churchyard open to people needing a home. More importantly, it introduces us to the Artist, to Jeff, and to Robin: their lives, their challenges, their humanity. It confronts our society’s callousness in allowing so many to go unhoused and demands, by bringing their stories to the fore, that we begin to respond with compassion and grace.

Maggie Helwig (she/they) is a white settler in Tkaronto/Toronto, and is the author of fifteen books and chapbooks, including Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community, which was awarded the 2025 Toronto Book Award, and Girls Fall Down (Coach House Books, 2008), which was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award and chosen as the One Book Toronto in 2012. Helwig is a long-time social justice activist, and also an Anglican priest, and has been the rector of the Church of St. Stephen-inthe-Fields since 2012.