Description of the World awarded 2017 Fred Cogswell Award

ANNOUNCING THE 2017 WINNER: 4TH ANNUAL FRED COGSWELL AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN POETRY

Congratulations!

It is with great pleasure to announce our 2017 winners of the Cogswell Award contest.  It was yet another rich year of wonderful poetry, and this year was by far the most successful of all RCLAS’s Cogswell awards.  We began the Cogswell Award in 2014 and it has been growing since then, becoming one of the most popular of our contests. We received a record number of poetry books from all across the country. Thank you to our judge, Candice James.

WINNERS of the 2017 Fred Cogswell Award For Excellence In Poetry
1st  Place ($500):
Johanna Skibsrud, THE DESCRIPTION OF THE WORLD (A Bookrider Book/Wolsak and Wynn)

2nd Place ($250): Timothy Shay, THE DIRTY KNEES OF PRAYER (Caitlin Press)

3rd Place ($100): Eva Tihanyi, THE LARGENESS OF RESCUE (Inanna Publications)

Description of the World awarded 2017 Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry

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.