2018 Book Awards: Winners
The League of Canadian Poets is proud to present the 2018 Book Awards winners of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Raymond Souster Award.
The winners will each receive $2000 thanks to funding from Canada Council for the Arts , Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council.
Learn more about the 2018 awards and celebrate the poetry of 2017:
2018 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 2017-2018 jurors of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award: Laura McRae, Sandra Ridley and Clea Roberts.
Winner
Otolith by Emily Nilsen (Goose Lane Editions)
From the jurors
With Otolith, Emily Nilsen questions how we name, categorize, and ultimately come to agree on the existence of the world and our relationship to it; she thrives in the impossible. Her poetry approaches the natural world in a post-language state where “every sound from our mouths” takes “the shape of a different sorrow.” Alternately obscuring and bringing into focus perception and self-perception, Nilson gives us a compelling collection that coalesces the protean, the liminal, and the mutable, and serves as a guide for a sacred equilibrium with the ecological through its invocation of temporal and corporeal uncertainties and discomforts
About Emily Nilsen
Emily Nilsen was born and raised in Vancouver. She has published poems in PRISM International, Lake, and the Goose, and in a chapbook entitled Place, No Manual. Nilsen was a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2015, after having been longlisted for the prize on three separate occasions. Her work has also been longlisted for the UK National Poetry Prize. She lives in Nelson, British Columbia.
About Otolith
Otolith — the ear stone — is a series of bones that help us to orient ourselves in space. In Otolith, Emily Nilsen attempts a similar feat in poetry: to turn the reader’s attention to their relationship to the world, revealing an intertidal state between the rootedness of place and the uncertainty and tenuousness of human connection. Born in the fecundity of British Columbia’s coastal rainforest, these poems are full of life and decay; they carry the odours of salmon rivers and forests of fir; salal growing in the fog-bound mountain slopes.
2018 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 2017-2018 jurors of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award: Bruce Meyer, Cheryl Antao-Xavier and Julie Cameron Gray.
Winner
Indianland by Lesley Belleau (ARP Books)
From the jurors
“The howl of Indian Land” is a haunting echo through Lesley Belleau’s Indianland raising the unease at a longstanding injustice impossible to make right. These poems present a passion that goes beyond words, a deep-seated duende that expresses a powerful range of emotions. This is a truly moving and outstanding collection and a work that will prove its lasting value to Canadian literature for years to come.
About Lesley Belleau
Lesley Belleau is an Anishnaabekwe writer from Ketegaunseebee Garden River First Nation (Ojibwe), near Bawating/Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Lesley lives in Peterborough where she is completing her PhD in Indigenous Studies at Trent. She also has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Windsor. She has sat on arts juries and won numerous writing grants and academic awards, including from the Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council. In interviews, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson lists Lesley as a talented emerging Indigenous writer.
About Indianland
Indianland is a rich and varied poetry collection. The poems are written from a female and Indigenous point of view and incorporate Anishinaabemowin throughout. Time is cyclical in this collection, moving from present day back to first contact and forward again. Themes of sexuality, birth, memory, and longing are explored. Images of blood, plants (milkweed, yarrow, cattails), and petroglyphs recur, and touchstone issues in Indigenous politics are addressed, including Elijah Harper, Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, forced sterilizations, and Kanesatake.
2018 RAYMOND SOUSTER WINNER
The Raymond Souster Award is given for a book of poetry by a League of Canadian Poets member. The award honours Raymond Souster, an early founder of the League of Canadian Poets. The award carries a $2,000 prize.
Thank you to the 2017-2018 jurors of the Raymond Souster Award: Hendrik Slegtenhorst, Almeda Miller and Jimmy McInnes.
Winner
Cloud Physics by Karen Enns (University of Regina Press)
From the jurors:
With Karen Enns’s poetry in Cloud Physics one gets the sense we are in the presence of some kind of sacred, fictional universe. There is a stark landscape in the collection and perhaps this vapor or fog or cloud is her intention. The central trajectory of these poems is an imploring wisdom, a “flare of unraveling, / some gorgeous waft” before we arrive at a “delicate bell of clarity/opened.” We’ve always been curious about the communal voice, the choral nature of the human heart and Enns invites us to migrate together, then she strands us with others in a chorus who “mouthed old psalms in the dusk.”
About Karen Enns
Karen Enns is the author of three collections of poetry: Cloud Physics, Ordinary Hours, and That Other Beauty, shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals including The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly, Grain, and The Antigonish Review. A native of Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, she studied music and worked as a classical pianist before publishing her first writing. She lives in Victoria, BC.
About Cloud Physics
In her third collection of poetry, Karen Enns ranges over endings of many kinds: cultural, ecological, and personal. But the poems are also replete with affirmations of love, of music and language, and of our rootedness in place and history. Enns describes our predicament with startling and surreal precision, yet also with tenderness and compassion. Her work is unusually wise in the ways of innocence as well as grief.