CBC BOOKS, CBC’s online home for literary content, together with its partners the Canada Council for the Arts and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, have announced the finalists for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize.
The finalists are:
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Conversations with Niton, Have you ever fallen in love with a day by Selina Boan (Vancouver)
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alley/bird/ally by Hiromi Goto (Victoria)
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Tickling the Scar by Matthew Hollett (Montreal/St. John’s)
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Learning to Count by Emily Riddle (Edmonton)
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Adipose Glose by Andrea Scott (Victoria)
The poems were selected from 2,930 entries received from across Canada, which sets the mark for the most entries for the CBC Poetry Prize on record. The public can read the shortlisted poems on CBCBooks.ca. The winner of this year’s prize will be announced on Thursday, November 12.
The 2020 CBC Poetry Prize jury is comprised of Kaie Kellough, Dionne Brand and Stephen Collis.
Kaie Kellough is a poet, sound performer and fiction writer based in Montreal. His latest works are the poetry collection Magnetic Equator and Dominoes at the Crossroads, a short story collection. His debut novel, Accordéon, was a 2017 Amazon.ca First Novel Award finalist. Magnetic Equator won the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Dionne Brand is a renowned poet, novelist and essayist. Brand won both the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Trillium Book Prize for her volume Land to Light On. Her book of poetry, Ossuaries won the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her latest books are The Blue Clerk, an essay poem which won the 2019 Trillium Book Award and Theory, a novel, which won the Bocas Fiction prize. She was poet laureate of Toronto and is a member of the Order of Canada.
Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons, On the Material, Once in Blockadia and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. In 2019, he was awarded the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, which honours a poet for their body of work. He lives near Vancouver and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.
In addition to a cash prize of $6000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Grand Prize winner will receive a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and will be published on the CBC Books website. The four other finalists will each receive $1000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and will be published on CBC Books.