Emerging writers Nayani Jensen and Faith Paré win $10K RBC Bronwen Wallace Awards
The prize recognizes unpublished writers in both poetry and short fiction
Nayani Jensen and Faith Paré were named the winners of this year's $10,000 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for emerging Canadian writers.
The annual award is sponsored by the RBC Foundation and recognizes writers who have been published but who have not yet been published in book form.
This prize was established in 1994 to honour the life and career of Bronwen Wallace, a poet and short story writer who felt that writers should have more opportunities for recognition early in their careers. The prize used to alternate between a short fiction and a poetry winner each year, but has given out awards in both categories annually since 2020.
Jensen won the short fiction prize for Like Rabbits.
"I've been working on these sort of historical science and fiction stories for a little while and trying to figure out how to talk about how we did science, how we got here, how we do it now," said Jensen in her acceptance speech. "And sometimes these pieces end up feeling a bit like, genre-wise, Frankenstein's monster. So it's been really wonderful to have this kind of support and encouragement at this stage in the process."
Jensen is a writer and science historian. Born and raised in Halifax, she studied mechanical engineering and then English literature and the history of science as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Toronto and working on her short story collection.
"Like Rabbits is historical fiction at its most intimate and convincing," said jurors Jessica Johns, Maria Reva and Jack Wang in a press statement.
"This story beautifully harks back to the golden age of Dutch science, a time when men played gods. As one such man attempts to conceive with his wife, he seeks credit for his groundbreaking discoveries at great personal cost — only to face tragedy and his own mortality."
This story beautifully harks back to the golden age of Dutch science, a time when men played gods.- Jurors Jessica Johns, Maria Reva and Jack Wang
The other finalists for the short fiction prize were Henry Heavyshield and Reid Kerr-Keller. They will each receive $2,500.
Paré won the poetry prize for Selections from 'a fine African head'.
"These instances are rare in the quiet, tinkering lives of poets and the generous platform provided by a prize that the Bronwen Wallace Award is charged with the intimate responsibility to the relationships that made this work possible," said Paré in her acceptance speech.
"These moments of celebration and gratitude also necessarily evoke whole histories and geographies which define the work and the conditions that they were written under. I began and will end these poems writing CJH that Bahamian student activists and young poet whose life and young death at 23 were shaped by a racist colonialism and carceral violence through policing and immigrant detention."
Paré is a Montreal-based poet and performer of Afro-Guyanese ancestry. Her work can be found in publications including The Capilano Review, The Ex-Puritan and Contemporary Verse 2. She won the first-ever Quebec Writers' Federation's Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship and is currently working on her poetry collection.
"Stunning and necessary, the poems in Selections from 'a fine African head' are not merely inspired by a historical event but emerge ingeniously from it," said jurors Derek Beaulieu, Kama La Mackerel and Joanna Lilley in a press statement.
"Faith Paré returns the truth not only to the victims, but also to the survivors of the 1969 Sir George Williams University computer centre incident. This urgent, chimerical and devastating work is finely crafted from the unreliability of archive and the misery of memory."
Stunning and necessary, the poems in Selections from 'a fine African head' are not merely inspired by a historical event but emerge ingeniously from it.- Jurors Derek Beaulieu, Kama La Mackerel and Joanna Lilley
Ashleigh A. Allen and Sneha Subramanian Kanta were the other poetry finalists. They will each receive $2,500.
The work of the winners and finalists can be found on the Writers' Trust website.
Last year's winners were Cooper Skjeie and Zak Jones for the poetry collection Scattered Oblations and the short story So Much More to Say, respectively.
Michael Crummey was the first writer to receive the prize. Other past winners include Maria Reva, Jeramy Dodds, Alison Pick and Alissa York.
The Writers' Trust of Canada is a charitable organization that seeks to advance, nurture and celebrate Canadian writers and writing. Its programming includes 11 national literary awards, financial grants, career development initiatives for emerging writers and a writers' retreat.
The organization was founded in 1976 by Margaret Atwood, Pierre Berton, Graeme Gibson, Margaret Laurence and David Young.
Corrections
- An earlier version of this article had RBC Emerging Artists as the sponsor. That program has been discontinued.Jun 04, 2024 9:49 AM EDT
