2026 LCP Book Awards: Winners
Congratulations to the 2026 book award winners
Congratulations to Hajer Mirwali, Karen Solie, and Rebecca Salazar, winners of the 2026 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, honours Raymond Souster, a founder of the League.
2026 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Winner
Hajer Mirwali, Revolutions (Talonbooks)
For a debut book of poetry
"Mirwali’s writing style is cutting edge and playful making for an incredibly admirable breakthrough book. Reading Revolutions is like having a companion that provides a familiar, daring feeling of clarity all while positioned within severe and surveilled conditions. There’s a secret life within these pages that beckons to be studied for its shimmering craft." - Gerald Lampert Memorial Award jury
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."
2026 Pat Lowther Memorial Award Winner
Karen Solie, Wellwater (House of Anansi)
For a book of poetry by a woman
"Karen Solie’s Wellwater is a flawless collection that not only recasts memories of growing up on her Saskatchewan farm but also reveals with candour and deep remorse humans' impact on land, ecosystems, living spaces, water and other beings. In what’s not said, Solie also captures the flinch of regret. In “Red Spring,” where she names the many trade-marked herbicides and pesticides, she writes, “I don’t know how to make this beautiful.” Here are unsentimental poems that, like a well, hold darkness and depth— reminders of what we poison and what we can still drink." - Pat Lowther Memorial Award jury
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.
"It's a great honour to be awarded this prize in memory of Pat Lowther, and to be in the company of the talented women on the longlist. I'm very grateful to the judges, and to the League of Canadian Poets for supporting Canadian poetry and making it possible for writers to travel to present their work.”
2026 Raymond Souster Award Winner
Rebecca Salazar, antibody (McClelland & Stewart)
For a new book of poetry by a League member
"What reluctant spells Rebecca Salazar’s antibody casts on the page, and with what speed their flames catch light in your hands. This collection cauterizes you in places you did not know needed healing. Ethereal, cinematic, and propulsive, Salazar’s is a many-winged poetics that endures and helps us endure—every turn a gasp, every reversed trope a hatchet cutting rotgut from precious earth-bodies, from an ever-expanding organism of queer-disabled-survivor rage. What unleashes is as wise as it is eviscerating.
Above all, antibody addresses the festering wounds of cis-heteropatriarchy, colonialism, and mass disabling climate disasters without eliding the ugliness of what these processes do to a person. An almanac of curse and ceremony, antibody is here to catch your breath just as you lose it. Its abundance of care and honesty greet our moment, histories, and possibilities with the bristling hum of “tongue-cut birds” that will stay with you for lifetimes." - Raymond Souster Award jury
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."