2016 Book Awards: Winners
The League of Canadian Poets is proud to present the 2016 Book Awards Winners, including the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Raymond Souster Award.
Learn more about the 2016 awards and celebrate the poetry of 2015:
Congratulations to the winners, shortlisters, longlisters and publishers!
2016 GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD WINNER
Awarded annually since 1981, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award is given in the memory of Gerald Lampert, an arts administrator who organized author tours and took a particular interest in the work of new writers. The award recognizes a first book of poetry published by a Canadian writer in the preceding year. The award carries a $2000 prize and is sponsored by the LCP.
Thank you to the jurors for the 2016 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award: Jim Johnstone, Micheline Maylor and Dwayne Morgan.
Winner
Ben Ladouceur – Otter (Coach House Books)
From the jurors
Otter’s relevant and finely honed skill shows exceptional attention and craft. His voice is edgy with honesty and originality. Elegies for things lost and weighted infuse the book with a tone of sorrowful yearning. Friends, lovers, and family are portraited with linguistic and syntactical care, such as in “I Am In Love With Your Brother,” or “Armadillo.” Ladoucer’s gritty perspective allows access to the world of a gay man, his loves, lusts, and fears laid bare with raw clarity and unabashed eroticism. This sort of bravery is rarely found in a first collection.
About Ben Ladouceur
Ben Ladouceur is a writer living in Ottawa. His first collection of poems, Otter (Coach House Books), was selected as a best book of 2015 by the National Post. Ben is also the prose editor for Arc Poetry Magazine.
About Otter
Moving from the absurdity of the First World War to the chaos of today’s cities, where men share beds, bottles of ouzo and shade from willow trees, these poems ask questions: If your lover speaks in his sleep, how do you know ‘you’ is you? What good is it to decorate a headstone? What if you think of the perfect comeback to a six-year-old argument? Otter fails, with style, to find answers.
2016 PAT LOWTHER MEMORIAL AWARD WINNER
The Pat Lowther Memorial Award is given for a book of poetry by a woman in Canada, and is in memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. The award carries a $2,000 prize. This award is inclusive of trans women and non-binary individuals who feel comfortable being recognized by a women’s prize.
Thank you to the jurors for the 2016 Pat Lowther Memorial Award: Judith Neale, Vanessa Shields, and Joan Shillington.
Winner
Lorna Crozier – The Wrong Cat (McClelland & Stewart)
From the jurors
The Wrong Cat is a book deeply nuanced in its exploration of the human condition. It encompasses the political and the sensual as it is layered with vivid imagery and powerful metaphor that moves between the animal, human and spiritual world with a gentle ferocity. Crozier’s poetry is rooted in the intimate that pulls the heart into each line and holds it there. It is fresh and insightful too, not easily done for a writer who has given us such an abundance of extraordinary poems in her long and laudable career. A career that offers both a guide to writing poetry that holds the world together and how to hold the self together as the world unravels.
About Lorna Crozier
Lorna Crozier is the award-winning author of fifteen previous books of poetry, including Small Mechanics, The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems, and Whetstone. She is also the author of The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things and the memoir Small Beneath the Sky. She is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria and an Officer of the Order of Canada, and she has received three honorary doctorates for her contributions to Canadian Literature. Born in Swift Current, she now lives in British Columbia.
About The Wrong Cat
Like the people and animals in her new collection, Lorna Crozier “defies / the anecdotal, / goes for the lyric, / music made from / bone and muscle and the grace notes” of life. The poems in The Wrong Cat are vintage Crozier: sly, sexy, irreverent, and sad, and populated by fully realized characters whose stories take place in a small lyrical space. We learn about a mother’s last breath, the first dog in heaven, a man’s fear that his wife no longer loves him, and the ways in which animals size up the humans around them and find them wanting. With Crozier’s celebrated mix of vibrant imagery, piercing observations, and deeply felt human emotions, these poems provide an affirmation in the midst of the fluid, often challenging nature of experience.
2016 RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD WINNER
The Raymond Souster Award was started in 2013 to honour Raymond Souster, an early founder of the League of Canadian Poets. The award is presented annually for a book of poetry by a League member published in the preceding year. The award carries a $2000 prize, and is sponsored by the LCP.
Thank you to the jurors for the 2016 Raymond Souster Award: Jenna Butler, Wendy Morton, and Charles Mountford.
Lorna Crozier – The Wrong Cat (McClelland & Stewart)
From the jurors
These are superbly realized lyrical poems. They are sophisticated and technically graceful. The book is “sly, sexy, irreverent and sad” with, always, a serious river of emotion running beneath it.
About Lorna Crozier
Lorna Crozier is the award-winning author of fifteen previous books of poetry, including Small Mechanics, The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems, and Whetstone. She is also the author of The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things and the memoir Small Beneath the Sky. She is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria and an Officer of the Order of Canada, and she has received three honorary doctorates for her contributions to Canadian Literature. Born in Swift Current, she now lives in British Columbia.
About The Wrong Cat
Like the people and animals in her new collection, Lorna Crozier “defies / the anecdotal, / goes for the lyric, / music made from / bone and muscle and the grace notes” of life. The poems in The Wrong Cat are vintage Crozier: sly, sexy, irreverent, and sad, and populated by fully realized characters whose stories take place in a small lyrical space. We learn about a mother’s last breath, the first dog in heaven, a man’s fear that his wife no longer loves him, and the ways in which animals size up the humans around them and find them wanting. With Crozier’s celebrated mix of vibrant imagery, piercing observations, and deeply felt human emotions, these poems provide an affirmation in the m