2021 Book Awards: Winners
The League of Canadian Poets is proud to present the 2021 Book Awards Winners, including the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Raymond Souster Award.
Learn more about the 2021 awards and celebrate the poetry of 2020:
We are also proud to announce the 2021 Winner of the Sheri-D Wilson Golden Beret Award.
Congratulations to the winners, shortlisters, longlisters and publishers!
2021 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 2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award: DA Lockhart, Nisha Patel and Phoebe Wang.
Winner
Bertrand Bickersteth – The Response of Weeds (NeWest Press, 2020)
From the jurors
Bickersteth’s vision powerfully highlights the erasure of Black communities in the Prairies and claims those histories and presences in the movements of land. The Response of Weeds is a work of research of a stunning range, occupying a powerful space in Canadian poetry. It reveals through its polyvocality and song-like lyricism the stories that no one else can tell but that generously involve and include the reader. Bickersteth’s work re-inserts the presence of Black subjectivity into “an easing confluence/ that confuses complaint in this country” that makes us realize what we lose by not attending to these dramatis personae of invisible men and women, made visible by his vivid figuration.
About Bertrand Bickersteth
Born in Sierra Leone, raised in Alberta, and formerly resided in the U.K. and the U.S., Bertrand Bickersteth is an educator who also writes plays and poems. In 2018, he was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. His debut collection of poetry, The Response of Weeds, was published in 2020 and was named one of CBC’s best books of poetry for the year. He was also named one of CBC’s six Black writers to watch for in 2021. His poetry has appeared in several publications, including The Antigonish Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, and his nonfiction is forthcoming in Prairie Fire (2021). He lives in Calgary, teaches at Olds College, and often (always, actually) writes about Black identity on the Prairies.
About The Response of Weeds
Bertrand Bickersteth’s debut poetry collection explores what it means to be black and Albertan through a variety of prisms: historical, biographical, and essentially, geographical. The Response of Weeds offers a much-needed window on often overlooked contributions to the province’s character and provides personal perspectives on the question of black identity on the prairies. Through these rousing and evocative poems, Bickersteth uses language to call up the contours of the land itself, land that is at once mesmerizing as it is dismissively effacing. Such is black identity here on this paradoxical land, too.
2021 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 2021 Pat Lowther Memorial Award: Puneet Dutt, Doyali Islam and Cassidy McFadzean.
Winner
Noor Naga – Washes, Prays (McClelland & Stewart, 2020)
From the jurors
Noor Naga’s Washes, Prays (McClelland & Stewart, 2020) is technically flawless – and thus achingly full of what it means to be human. In this striking novel-in-verse, Naga’s keen attention to every aspect of language shows readers-listeners what poetry can do – how capaciously it can operate. Rich with wit and empathy, these poems feel wholly welcoming. Naga captures both the joy and humour of a protagonist in an affair, as well as the despair and desperation of longing. Centring jewel-like poems in the voice of the protagonist’s friend, this collection shares meditations on desire, love, God, and friendship in a skillful lyric voice. These brilliant poems absolutely sing. Here is a poet who has already mastered her craft.
About Noor Naga
Noor Naga is an Alexandrian writer who was born in Philadelphia, raised in Dubai, studied in Toronto, and now lives in Cairo. Her verse-novel Washes, Prays was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2020. She is winner of the 2017 Bronwen Wallace Award, the 2019 RBC/PEN Canada Award, the 2019 Disquiet Fiction Prize, and the 2019 Graywolf Press Africa Prize. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in April 2022.
About Washes, Prays
Coocoo is a young immigrant woman in Toronto. Her faith is worn threadbare after years of bargaining with God to end her loneliness and receiving no answer. Then she meets her mirror-image; Muhammad is a professor and father of two. He’s also married.
Heartbreaking and hilarious, this verse-novel chronicles Coocoo’s spiraling descent: the transformation of her love into something at first desperate and obsessive, then finally cringing and animal, utterly without grace. Her best friend, Nouf, remains by her side throughout, and together they face the growing contradictions of Coocoo’s life. What does it mean to pray while giving your body to a man who cannot keep it? How long can a homeless love survive on the streets? These are some of the questions this verse-novel swishes around in its mouth.
2021 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 2021 Raymond Souster Award: Cheryl Antao-Xavier, Jacob MacArthur Mooney and David Martin
Winner
Ian Williams – Word Problems (Coach House Books, 2020)
From the jurors
In Word Problems, Ian Williams experiments with poetic form, syntax, and lineation to movingly consider experiences of race and racism in Canada. He engages with a number of interesting procedures, such as bisecting found texts, whirling lines in infinite loops, and setting impossible questions. These inventive methods are linked with suppositional narratives that wind through the collection. Williams’s imaginative use of craft, which is always centered on critical social issues, displays how language can both dissemble and unmask the complexities of relationships, mental health, and identity.
About Ian Williams
Ian Williams writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. He is the author of Word Problems, a poetry collection that considers the ethical and political issues of our time as math and grammar problems. His previous collection, Personals, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. His novel, Reproduction, won the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and his short story collection, Not Anyone’s Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada. He is currently an English professor at the University of Toronto after several years at UBC. A book of essays on race, Disorientation, is coming this fall. www.ianwilliams.ca
About Word Problems
Frustrated by how tough the issues of our time are to solve – racial inequality, our pernicious depression, the troubled relationships we have with other people – Ian Williams revisits the seemingly simple questions of grade school for inspiration: if Billy has five nickels and Jane has three dimes, how many Black men will be murdered by police? He finds no satisfaction, realizing that maybe there are no easy answers to ineffable questions.
Williams uses his characteristic inventiveness to find not just new answers but new questions, reconsidering what poetry can be, using math and grammar lessons to shape poems that invite us to participate. Two long poems cut through the text like vibrating bass notes, curiosities circle endlessly, and microaggressions spin into lyric. And all done with a light touch and a joyful sense of humour.