2025 LCP Book Awards: Winners
Congratulations to the 2025 book award winners
Congratulations to Marc Perez, Bren Simmers, and Chimwemwe Undi, winners of the 2025 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and Raymond Souster Award! Each award carries a $2,000 prize.
The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, for a debut book of poetry, is given in the memory of Gerald Lampert, an arts administrator who organized authors’ tours and took a particular interest in the work of new writers.
The Pat Lowther Memorial Award is awarded in memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. As a women’s prize, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award is inclusive of cis women, trans women, and non-binary writers who feel comfortable being recognized by a women’s prize.
The Raymond Souster Award, which celebrates a new book of poetry by a League member, honors Raymond Souster, a founder of the League.
2025 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Winner
Marc Perez, Dayo (Brick Books)
For a debut book of poetry
Dayo is a collection that documents each moment as it passes. It is lush and animate in describing the mundane, gentle in its nostalgia and reflections of home, and sharp in its commentary on enclosures and borders. Each word is a seed of complex sensory images that sprout through the page to find connections across the book. These poems are elegant in the way they consider how fleeting each moment really is, while being deeply rooted in the possibilities of a good life. It is a nourishing and sturdy achievement.
Marc Perez is the author of Dayo (Brick Books, 2024) and the chapbook, Domus (Anstruther Press, 2025). His work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, EVENT, CV2, PRISM International, and Vallum, among others. Originally from Manila, he currently lives with his family in Vancouver.
It's humbling to know that fellow poets read Dayo with such intent and depth.
2025 Pat Lowther Memorial Award Winner
Bren Simmers, The Work (Gaspereau Press)
For a book of poetry by a woman
Bren Simmers’ The Work is a fearless and meticulously crafted exploration of grief, love, and the quiet weight of mourning. Through daring omissions and deliberate weavings—guided by singular vision and masterful restraint—Simmers turns a rhythmic assemblage of losses into a space for deep, transformative engagement. Moving beyond mere depiction, this unflinching collection fully embodies the descent and disintegration wrought by terminal illness, dementia, and death, and offers a resonant shared experience of human fragility and endurance.
Bren Simmers is the winner of the CBC Poetry Prize and The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. Her latest poetry collection, The Work (Gaspereau Press), was a finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Awards and the J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award. She lives on Epekwitk/PEI.
Being a finalist for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award is a great honour both for me and for those I lost. I hope this recognition allows the book to reach readers who are going through their own grief journey.
2025 Raymond Souster Award Winner
Chimwemwe Undi, Scientific Marvel (House of Anansi)
For a new book of poetry by a League member
Equal parts personal and political, demanding and accessible, sweeping and specific, Scientific Marvel remarks on our modern settings and our sense of self with formal experimentation and a command of language as unique and nuanced as the multitudinous places it inhabits. This is a book that dares to encapsulate so many of contemporary life’s most pressing issues, doing so with a sharp wit and an inventive style. A striking debut from a prescient new poetic voice.
Chimwemwe Undi is a poet, editor and lawyer living and writing on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her debut collection, Scientific Marvel, won the 2024 Governor General's Literary Award. She is Canada's Parliamentary Poet Laureate for 2025 and 2026.
I am so grateful. Past lists of LCP Book Award finalists and winners have heavily influenced my reading lists and me, and I am moved to know that Scientific Marvel will be counted among them.