2020 Book Awards: Winners
The League of Canadian Poets is proud to present the 2020 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 2020 awards and celebrate the poetry of 2019:
2020 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 2020 jurors of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award: Ben Ladouceur, Robin Richardson and Anna Yi.
Winner
Float and Scurry by Heather Birrell (Anvil Press/A Feed Dog Book)
From the jurors
In the rapid-fire collection Float and Scurry, Heather Birrell tackles parenting, patriarchy, personal politics and much more, often while driving the reader to laughter. So many of this book’s subjects and projects are notoriously difficult to write in a way that is engaging: meditations on modern technology, extended dream sequences, notes towards an unwritten novel. Like a champion roller-skater, Birrell makes each near-impossible feat look effortless and entertaining. Every word soars, every moment works.
About Heather Birrell
Heather Birrell is the author of two short story collections: Mad Hope (Coach House Books, 2012) and I know you are but what am I? (Coach House Books, 2004). Her stories have been shortlisted for both the Western and National Magazine Awards and have appeared in numerous Canadian literary journals. A frequent book reviewer and winner of the Journey Prize, she also works as a high school teacher and a creative writing instructor.
About Float and Scurry
In acclaimed short-fiction writer Heather Birrell’s rollicking debut full-length poetry collection, Mr. T, Joni Mitchell, Fidel Castro, and the poet’s mother (among others) barge in to distract and derail the poet’s dreams. The poems in this book are playful, hallucinatory, and often funny. They explore the far-fetchedness and perseverance of love between friends and family members, the importance of libraries and locked mental health wards, and ways to live with meaning in the face of a looming apocalypse. Birrell’s poetry lines—weaving through an acrobatic breadth of forms and tones—are both precise and plainspoken, and showcase an odd, intuitive logic, embracing the surrealism of this world we’re stuck in.
2020 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 2020 jurors of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award: Annick MacAskill, Billeh Nickerson and Soraya Peerbaye.
Winner
How She Read by Chantal Gibson (Caitlin Press)
From the jurors
Chantal Gibson’s How She Read creates its illuminating poetics through language, image, and a hieroglyphic that only slowly reveals its significance. From a song of praise to Black girls; to an homage to the poet’s grandfather, a member of the 1967 CPR Mixed Bowling Team; to the dark wit of women in a daguerreotype and an oil painting considering their place in art and science, Gibson shows us how we are taught racism, and opens a door to its unlearning. What she asks of the reader is to read closer; to decipher what has been hidden; to acknowledge what has been said and said all along. Calling to many Black women in Canadian literature – Dionne Brand, Afua Cooper, Lorena Gale and M. NourbeSe Philip, among others – Gibson’s work is both communal and wholly its own, How She Read is unforgiving and unapologetic, fierce and adoring.
About Chantal Gibson
Chantal Gibson is a poet-artist-educator from Vancouver working in the overlap between literary and
visual art. From academic history books to kitschy souvenir spoons, her work unpacks imperialist ideas
quietly embedded in everyday things. Confronting colonialism head-on, her literary and visual works
exploit the myths, tropes and narratives that go unchecked across the Canadian cultural landscape.
While forging new spaces for voices silenced by historical erasure, Gibson challenges and celebrates
representations of Black womanhood. Named one of CBC’s 6 Black writers to watch in 2019, Gibson is
an award-winning teacher in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.
About How She Read
How She Read is a collection of genre-blurring poems about the representation of Black women, their hearts, minds and bodies, across the Canadian cultural imagination.
Drawing from grade-school vocabulary spellers, literature, history, art, media and pop culture, Chantal Gibson’s sassy semiotics highlight the depth and duration of the imperialist ideas embedded in everyday things, from storybooks to coloured pencils, from paintings to postage stamps.
A mediation on motherhood and daughterhood, belonging, loss and recovery, the collection weaves the voices of Black women, past and present. As Gibson dismantles the grammar of her Queen Elizabeth English, sister scholars talk back, whisper, suck teeth, curse and carry on from canonized texts, photographs and art gallery walls, reinterpreting their image, re-reading their bodies and claiming their space in a white, hegemonic landscape.
Using genre-bending dialogue poems and ekphrasis, Gibson reveals the dehumanizing effects of mystifying and simplifying images of Blackness. Undoing the North Star freedom myth, Harriet Tubman and Viola Desmond shed light on the effects of erasure in the time of reconciliation and the dangers of squeezing the past into a Canada History Minute or a single postage stamp. Centrefolds Delia and Marie Therese discuss their naked Black bodies and what it means to be enslaved, a human subject of art and an object of science, while Veronica? tells it like it is, what it means to hang with the Group of Seven on the walls of the Art Gallery of Ontario amongst the lakes, the glaciers, the mountains and the dying trees. Supported by the voices of Black women writers, the poems unloose the racist misogyny, myths, tropes and stereotypes women of colour continue to navigate every day.
Thoughtful, sassy, reflective and irreverent, How She Read leaves a Black mark on the landscape as it illustrates a writer’s journey from passive receiver of racist ideology to active cultural critic in the process of decolonizing her mind.
2020 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 2019-2020 jurors of the Raymond Souster Award: Jim Johnstone, Randy Lundy and Suzanne Zelazo!
Winner
Unmeaningable by Roxanna Bennett (Gordon Hill Press)
From the jurors:
Roxanna Bennett’s Unmeaningable explores pain and the body with a devastating and vital honesty. These poems subvert expectation—both in chosen poetic form, but also in the assumptions of an ableist society—and challenge the reader to rethink ability and otherness. Bennett explores restraint not simply as a limitation, but as a means of amplification. These poems don’t ask for—nor need—permission.
About Roxanna Bennett
Roxanna Bennett is a disabled poet gratefully living on the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation which is covered under the Williams Treaties. She is the author of unseen garden (chapbook, knife | fork | book, 2018), The Uncertainty Principle (Tightrope Books, 2014) and Unmeaningable, available from Gordon Hill Press.
About Unmeaningable
Unmeaningable welcomes you to the freak show, where the monster on display is a culture that stigmatizes sickness and a system that shames the sufferer. Behold the wonder of the ages, a human mind in a human body, dissected and displayed for entertainment. Witness the ritual of surgical sacrifice! Observe the indignity of institutionalization! Be astounded by the indifference of ableism and ignorance! This uncanny collection of “crippled” sonnets features a thrilling display of cannibals, chimeras, and the crucial question: What meaning can be made of a life lived in pain and isolation?