Finalists to be honoured the evening of November 12 at Cabaret Lion d’Or
The Quebec Writers’ Federation is delighted to announce the finalists for the 2024 carte blanche Prize!
Sponsored by Mark Gallop, the carte blanche Prize is awarded once a year in recognition of an outstanding submission to QWF’s online literary journal, carte blanche, by a Quebec writer, artist, or translator. Winners receive a cash prize of $500 and a unique trophy—“The Lori”—created by Montreal artist Glen LeMesurier. The other two finalists will receive $200 and $150, respectively, for second and third place.
The winner will be announced at the 2024 QWF Literary Awards Gala on Tuesday, November 12 at Cabaret Lion d’Or. The ceremony will begin at 8:00 p.m., preceded by a cocktail reception from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
The 2024 carte blanche Prize Finalists
Deborah Ostrovsky
“Zoologies”
(Translation)
Issue 49, 2024
Translated from Laurence Leduc-Primeau, Zoologies (La Peuplade, 2018)
Deborah Ostrovsky lives and writes in Montreal. Her writing and translations have appeared in Geist, Maisonneuve Magazine, carte blanche, Minola Review, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She is a recent alumna of the Bread Loaf Literary Translators’ Conference and Bristol Translates in the UK.
Lena Palacios
“Playtime in Carmella’s Room: A Memoir”
(Creative Non-Fiction)
Issue 49, 2024
Lena Palacios is a queer, disabled, mixed-race Chicana with Tepehuana and settler ancestry surviving/thriving in Tiohtià:ke. They play with their cats/muses, Sonny, Sher, and Kimchi, when not writing on the run. They are in First People Studies at Concordia University and will begin a Master’s in Information Studies at McGill University. The ultimate goal is to become your badass specialist librarian, hacktivist, and anti-colonial archivist. Born on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, they grew up picking up seashells on Ohlone and Pomo lands. Lena was shortlisted for The Fiddlehead’s 2024 Creative Nonfiction Contest.
Erin Robinsong
“BONE EATING SNOT FLOWER”
(Poetry)
Issue 48, 2024
Erin Robinsong is a poet and interdisciplinary artist working with ecological imaginaries. She is the author of Rag Cosmology (Book*hug, 2017) and Wet Dream (Brick Books, 2022), both winners of the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Collaborative performance works with Hanna Sybille Müller and Andréa de Keijzer include Polymorphic Microbe Bodies, This ritual is not an accident, and Facing away from that which is coming. Erin grew up in Coast Salish Territory, on Cortes Island. @erobinsong on Instagram.
The 2024 carte blanche Juror
Klara Du Plessis
Klara du Plessis is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar, literary curator, and writer, known for her contributions to long-form and translingual poetics. Her most recent publications include Post-Mortem of the Event (Palimpsest Press, 2024), a poetic work that mobilizes audiovisual media, transcription, waveform visualization, and digital humanities methods, and I’mpossible collab (Gaspereau Press, 2023), a collection of literary essays on contemporary Canadian poetry. Klara’s debut collection Ekke won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and her critical writing received Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2022 Critic’s Desk Award. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan), and divides her time between Montreal, Kelowna, and Cape Town.
The 2024 QWF Awards Gala
The winner of the 2024 carte blanche Prize will be announced at the 2024 QWF Awards Gala on Tuesday, November 12.
The gala will also unveil the winners of the 2024 QWF Literary Awards in fiction, non-fiction, first book, translation, poetry, playwriting, spoken word, and children’s and young adult literature. The winner of the 2024 QWF College Writers Award will also be revealed, and Christopher DiRaddo will be honoured as the recipient of the 2024 Judy Mappin Community Award.
The gala is open to the public, but tickets have now sold out. A cocktail reception will be held from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., followed by the awards ceremony at 8 p.m. The ceremony will be recorded and published on our YouTube channel.
Media Inquiries:
John Wickham, Communications Officer
(819) 319-9210
john@qwf.org