Canadian Authors Association Literary Awards
The Canadian Authors Association Literary Awards Program was created in 1975 to honour writing that achieves excellence without sacrificing popular appeal.
Past award recipients have included Carol Shields, Hugh MacLennon, W. P. Kinsella, Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Leonard Cohen—and many other Canadian literary stars.
The Canadian Authors Association’s awards program complements the association’s ongoing tradition of writers helping writers.
Canadian Authors Award for Poetry
Winner: Johanna Skibsrud for The Description of the World (Wolsak and Wynn)
Johanna Skibsrud is the author of two previous collections of poetry, I Do Not Think that I Could Love a Human Being and Late Nights With Wild Cowboys; two novels, Quartet for the End of Time and the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning novel The Sentimentalists; and the short fiction collection This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories. An Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arizona, Skibsrud and her family divide their time between Tucson and Cape Breton.