2026 LCP Book Awards: Shortlists
Celebrating the 2026 book award shortlists
Congratulations to all the poets and publishers featured on the shortlists of our Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and Raymond Souster Award! We are thrilled to be highlighting six books on each shortlist, selected with care by a panel of jurors. Each award carries a $2,000 prize for the winner.
An online reading will be held on Tuesday, June 2, 2026 at 8pm ET to celebrate the shortlisted poets. The event will feature brief readings from shortlisted poets, and will not be recorded.
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, honours Raymond Souster, a founder of the League.
Winners announced June 3, 2026
2026 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Shortlist
For a debut book of poetry
Comments from the jurors:
2026 Pat Lowther Memorial Award Shortlist
For a book of poetry by a woman
Comments from the jurors:
2026 Raymond Souster Award Shortlist
For a new book of poetry by a League member
Comments from the jurors:
About the finalists
Joséphine Bacon is an Innu poet born in 1947 in Passamit, Nitassinan / Québec, and now living in Montréal. An icon of Québec literature, she writes in Innu-aimun and French, and has been invited to read her poems in many countries. She has also worked as a translator, community researcher, documentary filmmaker, curator, and songwriter.
She spent her early years on the land with her family, living a nomadic life and hearing the stories passed down from her Ancestors. At the age of four, she entered residential school in Mani-Utenam (Maliotenam), where she remained until she was nineteen. She later moved to Montréal and became a translator and transcriber for anthropologists interviewing Innu Elders and knowledge keepers in Labrador and Québec.
Her poetry has won many awards, including the Indigenous Voices Award, the international Ostana Prize (for writers whose mother tongue is a language of limited diffusion), and the Prix des libraires du Québec, and has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. She received an honorary doctorate from Université Laval in 2016 and has been inducted into the Ordre de Montréal and the Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec. She is the subject of the documentary film Je m’appelle humain (Call Me Human), by Kim O’Bomsawin.
Joséphine Bacon has said, “The poems I write are for those to come, so that they do not forget their origins in a land that will recognize their footsteps.”
Stephanie Bolster’s latest book of poetry, Long Exposure, began as an exploration of Robert Polidori’s photographs of New Orleans and Chernobyl, and extended inward and outward from there. Excerpts from Long Exposure were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2019. Bolster’s first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems, won the Governor General’s Award and the Gerald Lampert Award and was translated into French as Pierre Blanche. Her poems have also been translated into Spanish, German, and Serbo-Croatian. Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 and The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems by the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner, and co-editor of Penned: Zoo Poems, she was born in Vancouver and grew up in Burnaby, BC. She has been a professor of creative writing at Concordia University since 2000 and lives in Pointe-Claire, Québec, on the Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) territory of Skaniatara:ti. This is her third time being shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award.
"It's an honour to be shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award. Having spent fifteen years working on Long Exposure makes this recognition particularly meaningful to me. This was a challenging book to write, and this recognition deepens my appreciation of all I learned during that process. I'm grateful to the League and to the award jury for their attention to my work."
Qurat Dar is the author of Non-Prophet (Goose Lane Editions 2025), winner of the inaugural Claire Harris Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. She was the City of Mississauga’s Youth Poet Laureate from 2021-2023 and the 2020 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam National Champion. Qurat’s poems have appeared in Augur, EVENT, Arc Poetry Magazine, and across the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) network.
"It's an honour and an absolute delight to have my work seen and celebrated by the poetry community. My deepest thanks to the jury and to the League for championing Canadian poetry in countless ways."
Tea Gerbeza (she/they) is the author of How I Bend Into More (Palimpsest Press, 2025), which won the 2026 Saskatchewan Book Awards Poetry Award, and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust 2025 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for 2SLGBTQ+ emerging writers, the Saskatchewan Book Awards First Book Award and Book of the Year Award. She is also a co-author of the chapbook, Prairie Queers (GridLock Lit, 2026). Tea is a neuroqueer disabled writer and multimedia artist with a very loud laugh. She is one of four Pain Poets. You can find them on instagram @poetgerby. Find out more on teagerbeza.com.
"Being a finalist for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award has me gobsmacked. There are no words to convey the thank you I hold inside my heart for this recognition. My book is weird; it’s full of playful, unconventional form, images, paper-quilling as verse, all for my bodymind to be (re)articulated. For my book to be recognized this way gives me the encouragement to continue to experiment with how my bodymind-poetic calls to the page, and serves as a reminder that my queer disabled experiences deserve to be heard and held."
Farah Ghafoor is the author of Shadow Price (House of Anansi, 2025). Finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and Trillium Award for Poetry, longlisted for the Toronto Book Awards, and named a CBC Best Book of the Year, selections of Shadow Price won the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize and were recognized by the CBC Poetry Prize. Her work appears anthologies, post-secondary course curriculums, art exhibitions like Who's Afraid of Labour Justice? and Structural Integrity, as well as in magazines such as The Walrus, The Offing, Brick Magazine, and The Fiddlehead. She lives in Tkaranto (Toronto).
"It's an honour to be a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award! I'm so grateful, and so motivated to continue working on my craft."
Kyo Lee is a Korean Canadian writer from Waterloo, Ontario, studying history and literature at Yale College. She was a winner of the CBC Poetry Prize and a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. Her work also appears in Narrative, Nimrod, Prism, The Forge, and This Magazine, among others. She has a love-hate relationship with summer, improv baking, and poetry. You can visit her at kyolee.me.
"To me, being shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award means the possibility of a career devoted to a world I love. It encourages me to continue creating, and I hope it signals the beginning stage of a lifelong commitment to literary craft."
Todd Meyers is a writer and anthropologist living in Montreal. He teaches at McGill University where he is a professor and the Marjorie Bronfman Chair in Social Studies of Medicine. Gone Gone is his first book of poetry. Of the book’s genre, Molly Young in The New York Times writes, “Good luck to the brave librarians tasked with determining a shelf for this marvel!” She goes on: “In tender and photographic prose, Meyers documents and dilates upon the lives of three people (or characters?)—their loves, jokes, overdoses, shoplifting convictions, childhoods, joys, losses. Over the past two decades we’ve seen a great deal of excellent reporting and fiction on the mass casualty event that is opioid addiction; this is the first account I’ve found that must be respirated rather than read.” Gone Gone was a finalist for the 2025 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Todd is currently completing a book about belonging and hate-related violence in rural America.
"I’m not sure if other writers have a sense of how their books might be received as they write, but I find it impossible to predict. My best hope is that what I write will resonate in some small way for someone, somewhere. I’m grateful to know that this book resonates in ways that so many others have over the many years of this award. It’s truly an honour to be a finalist."
Hajer Mirwali is a Palestinian and Iraqi writer living in Toronto. Her first book, Revolutions (Talonbooks, 2025) — a collection of poetry on shame, pleasure, and Arab Muslim girlhood — is a finalist for the 2026 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Two poems from the collection also appear in an anthology of Palestinian poetry called Heaven Looks Like Us (Haymarket Books, 2025). Hajer’s work has been published in The Ex-Puritan, Brick Magazine, Room Magazine, and Joyland. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph, and a BA in Creative Writing from York University.
"It is an incredible honour to have my work recognized and validated by such an esteemed organization, alongside so many talented poets. I am very grateful to be seen and supported, and I feel more invigorated than ever to keep writing."
Jessica Moore is an author and an award-winning literary translator. Her first book, Everything, now (Brick Books) is a love letter to the dead. The Whole Singing Ocean (Nightwood) is a true story blending long poem, investigation, sailor slang and inherited grief. Jessica's work-in-progress, Porous, is a memoir of motherhood and art.
I am so pleased and grateful to see Joséphine Bacon's work, and my translation, honoured in this way!
Cecily Nicholson is a past recipient of the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and the inaugural Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading award from the poetry in canada society. Her collaborative practice spans museum, artist-run, and community arts organizing and education. She was the 2025 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at UC Berkeley, the 2021 Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor, and the 2017 Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer in Residence at Simon Fraser University. Nicholson teaches in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) people.
"My thanks to the League and to the jurors for your time and consideration. I am delighted to hear that Crowd Source and its corvid sensibilities resonate with you. I am inspired and honoured to be celebrated among literary community."
Jide Salawu’s writings explore the question of Black mobilities, diasporic struggles, nationhood, history, cultural identity, and socio-justice. He is the author of Preface for Leaving Homeland, published under the African Poetry Book Fund Boxset (2019), and Contraband Bodies, published by NeWest Press (2026). His individual work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, The Walrus, Salt Hill, CBC, Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Schooner, LitHub, and so on. Salawu is a recipient of different awards, including the Fulbright Scholarship. Salawu presently holds a Black Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is currently leading a community creative project that names, probes, and reimagines seasonal struggles in the Afro-Canadian diaspora and beyond.
"Contraband Bodies offers me a poetic opportunity to capture the persistence of out-of-placeness, crisis of belonging, and other issues that the Black migrant subjects face. I am excited to be shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Raymond Souster Award because it means people are finding meaning and resonance in my work, and that the universe of insights it offers is expanding. A good pat on the back, I say."
Rebecca Salazar is the author of antibody (McClelland & Stewart, 2025), a collection of poems that confronts the entanglement of gendered and ecological violence on queer, racialized, and disabled bodies. Their first collection, sulphurtongue (McClelland & Stewart, 2021), was a finalist for multiple awards including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, and a French translation by Madeleine Stratford is available under the title soufrelangue (Prise de parole, 2022). Rebecca currently lives on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik.
"For years, I have followed LCP's longlists as a point of connection to poets I would not otherwise have gotten to know. I am grateful to be part of this celebration from the other side, and am doubly nourished by sharing it with fellow writers and readers who value how transformative poetry can be. More than a career, poetry is a practice of radical acknowledgement and imagination, of holding this world as it is and rewriting new futures. It is an honour to dream these together."
Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw and grew up on the family farm in southwest Saskatchewan. She is the author of six collections of poetry: Short Haul Engine (Brick, 2001), Modern and Normal (Brick, 2005), Pigeon (Anansi, 2009), The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (2014 Anansi and FSG), The Caiplie Caves (2019, Anansi, Picador 2020 FSG), and Wellwater 2025 Anansi , Picador 2026 FSG). A volume of selected poems, The Living Option, was published in the U.K. in 2013. Karen has taught writing across Canada, in the U.S., and the U.K., and currently teaches half-time for the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
"I am honoured to be shortlisted for this award in Pat Lowther's name, that honours poetry by women. It is a wonderful encouragement, and so appreciated."
Anna Swanson is a queer writer, librarian, and poetry editor with Riddle Fence. She is the author of The Garbage Poems (Brick Books, 2025), which was longlisted for a Winterset Award and is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Her first book, The Nights Also (Tightrope, 2010), won a Lambda Literary Award and the Gerald Lampert Award. Her writing also appears in various anthologies including On Occasion, Best Canadian Poetry, Impact: Women Writing After Concussion, In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry, and Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis. She recently completed an MFA at the University of Guelph and lives in St. John’s, Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland. Her special interests include collective liberation and wild swimming in all seasons. https://annaswanson.ca/
"The League of Canadian Poets has already supported my writing life in many ways—funding readings that introduce me to new work, connecting me with other writers, helping me launch two books into the world, and insisting on poetry as a vital part of everyday life. This book is, among other things, a record of my experience returning to poetry after a five year hiatus following a head injury and learning to write in a way that accommodated the changing capacity of my brain. It means so much to know that other poets read this book with care and attention and were moved by it."
Gillian Sze is a poet and children's writer. She is the recipient of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for her poetry and essay collection, Quiet Night Think, and the QWF’s A. M. Klein Poetry Prize for her latest book, An Orange, A Syllable. Her books for children have been shortlisted for the Janet Savage Blachford Prize for Children's and Young Adult Literature, the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children’s Book Awards, and CBC Kids Read. Gillian’s work has also been translated into Slovenian, French, Italian, Turkish, Hebrew, Spanish, and Greek. She teaches creative writing and literature at Concordia University.
"I am so honoured by this recognition. The book first began in my head years ago when I was standing in the middle of my small kitchen. To see it receive this care, attention, and support from the jurors—I am humbled. Thank you for giving my book a spot on the shortlist for the Raymond Souster Award!"
katherena vermette (she/her/hers) is a Michif (Red River Métis) writer from Treaty 1 territory, the heart of the Métis Nation, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Writer of arguably too many genres, her books include, North End Love Songs (Muses’ Company) winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, and novels The Break, winner of the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and The Strangers, winner of the Atwood Gibson Prize for Fiction.
She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia, and an honourary Doctor of Letters from the University of Manitoba, and works as a Senior Editor at Simon and Schuster Canada. katherena lives with her family in a cranky old house within skipping distance of the temperamental Red River.
"I am truly honoured. The value of awards cannot be understated. To be recognized by your peers is the best kind of feeling. chi maarsii. Thank you."
Originally from the West Coast, Christine Wu is a Chinese-Canadian poet who now lives on the East Coast, in Mi'kma'ki, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq people. She was the winner of the 2023 RBC PEN Canada New Voices Award and a finalist for the 2022 RBC Writers’ Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her debut poetry collection, Familial Hungers, was published by Brick Books in 2025 and is currently shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award.
"Poetry is such a personal and subjective genre. It has been so touching to have my debut poetry collection so well-received. It's really affirming, especially as an early career writer, to hear that my work has resonated with readers."