On Tuesday, November 12, 2024, Quebec’s English-language literary community gathered for the 26th QWF Literary Awards Gala.
Ten winners were revealed across eight categories: first book, spoken word, children’s and young adult literature, non-fiction, poetry, playwriting, translation, and fiction. Each book award includes a cash prize of $3,000.
The winners of the QWF College Writers Award, the carte blanche Prize, and the Judy Mappin Community Award were also announced.
View the winners and the juror’s comments below.
2024 Ian Ferrier Spoken Word Prize
Moe Clark
“Committing a dream/pawâkan Palestine”
About “Committing a dream/pawâkan Palestine,” the jurors said:
In this musically supported cinematic poem, Moe Clark draws connections through Indigenous struggles for self-determination and land rights. We are taken on a sparrow’s journey over walls and borders, comparing native plants, herbs, and ancestral rivers. “Committing a dream / pawâkan Palestine” is a powerful call for Palestinian freedom and land back for all Indigenous peoples.
Lucia De Luca
“Congratulations”
About “Congratulations,” the jurors said:
“Congratulations” is a beautiful nostalgic narrative; in it, Lucia De Luca paints memories of her nonna, family dinners, and the passing around of Italian language. It ends with a grief-laden comparison of death and birth.
Mac van den Hoeven
“Memory Justice”
About “Memory Justice,” the jurors said:
Mac van den Hoeven’s performance of “Memory Justice” is powerfully intimate, honest, and bold in its understatement. Narrating a situation of connection through misrecognition, across generations, van den Hoeven’s delivery of this well-crafted-poem uses subtle gestures and quiet, direct-address, to convey the speaker’s right to refuse to be “remembered wrong.”
Jurors: Jason Camlot, Roen Higgins, Janice Jo Lee
2024 Concordia University First Book Prize
Sabrina Reeves
Little Crosses
House of Anansi Press
About Little Crosses, the jurors said:
“This novel is riveting. At the centre of the realist narrative is a heart-breaking effort to save a loved one who does not consent to being saved.
“Delving into glorious, heartbreaking, and surprising details, Reeves presents a childhood riddled with contradictions and shows readers how one person travels a bumpy road to adulthood.
“There’s justified anger, laugh-out-loud funny, and delicate egg-shell walking.
“Overall, she succeeds in evoking both the searing impact of alcoholism and the deep, underlying love that sustains a family through grief and torment.“
Jurors: Mark Abley, Nicole Markotic, Tavleen Purewal
2024 Janet Savage Blachford Prize for Children’s & Young Adult Literature
Marie-Louise Gay
Hopscotch
Groundwood Books
About Hopscotch, the jurors said:
“Borrowing from the school story, the fantasy story, the animal story, and even the horror story, among other genres characteristic of the children’s literary canon, Hopscotch provides readers with a story of impressive psychological depth…. It is also a wonderful ode to the child’s imagination and the power of creativity.
“The images offer a clever visual exploration of Ophelia’s psyche: they are colourful and luminous when all is right; dark and washed out when things get rough. All is heightened by Gay’s use of many different techniques: watercolour, pencils, and pastels, to name a few, are mixed with great ingenuity to build a rich visual world.”
Jurors: Jeffrey Canton, Laura May Vogel, Eldon Yellowhorn
Le Prix de traduction de la Fondation Cole 2024
Stéphane Martelly
Équateur magnétique
Triptyque
Traduction de Magnetic Equator, Kaie Kellough (McLelland & Stewart)
À propos d’Équateur magnétique, les jurés ont écrit :
« La traduction de Stéphane Martelly est truffée de belles trouvailles. Que ce soit en maniant d’exigeantes contraintes formelles ou en reproduisant le souffle incisif des poèmes de Kellough, Martelly s’en tire brillamment et avec un plaisir évident.
« Forte d’un souci de fluidité et de consonances salutaires, la traduction de Martelly rend avec brio l’esprit parfois caustique et l’altérité inhérente d’un projet poétique aussi ambitieux que celui de Kellough.
« Dans l’ensemble du texte, on y sent l’affinité de la traductrice pour ces textes – la nature caribéenne du contexte, de la langue utilisée sont absolument bien rendus par Mme Martelly, on y sent son expertise, son propre vécu, son bagage professionnel et culturel personnels. »
Les jurés : Rémi Labrecque, Francis Langevin, Sauline Letendre
2024 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry
Derek Webster
National Animal
Véhicule Press/Signal Editions
About National Animal, the jurors said:
Derek Webster’s National Animal explores all the subtleties of what it is to be Canadian in a poetry that is exquisitely crafted. In Montréal, where questions of nation and nationalism have always been sensitive and indigenous, French, Anglo and immigrant identities jostle together in anxieties, uncertainties, wishes, and desires; he comprehends the impossibility of Canada other than as a series of brutalities and broken dreams that cannot even be expressed as an “imagined community.”
Webster has a complete command of craft, and all these poems are taut and finely tuned. His images and metaphors are a balance of the hard and striking to the quiet and evocative. The emotional range is as complex and subtle as a fine wine.
Jurors: Joanne Arnott, Ross Leckie, Nisha Patel
2024 Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction
Gail Scott
Furniture Music
Wave Books
About Furniture Music, the jurors said:
“This is a challenging and starkly original book. It invites the reader into engagement with a passionate and articulate mind while at the same time granting them a great deal of space and agency. The unnaturalness of the prose—carved not at its syntactic joints, but in a way that creates amputated stumps of sentences—elicits a slightly disoriented, watchful attentiveness in the reader.
“Furniture Music isn’t interested in grand pronouncements; it’s Scott’s experience of the way the headlines eat into the everyday, which is a statement all its own.
“Moody, intellectually stimulating, and often contradictory, Furniture Music is a call to active thought.“
Jurors: Michelle Coupal, Alex Manley, Julie Sedivy
2024 QWF Prize for Playwriting
Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy
Salesman in China
Stratford Theatre
About Salesman in China, the jurors said:
Brodie and Sy’s adaptation of Arthur Miller’s non-fictional “Salesman in Beijing” is a massive dramatic machine with many moving parts. The playwrights’ deftly hewn characters and dual-language dialogue drive the plot of this opus.
It’s hugely ambitious. It is also meticulously structured, and so remains cohesive and compelling on the page, despite the large number of characters and the fact that it is continually performed in two languages simultaneously translated.
Ultimately, the story is about fathers and sons, as Miller always argued “Death of a Salesman” is. It is on these tragic, human terms that “Salesman in China” finds its climax, its emotional centre, and its deepest connection to the brilliant, iconic play that inspired its existence.
Jurors: Bonnie Farmer, Emil Sher, Marcus Youssef
2024 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction
Sabrina Reeves
Little Crosses
House of Anansi Press
About Little Crosses, the jurors said:
“Reeves has crafted a complex and nuanced portrait of a family coping with alcoholism. The novel paints a vivid portrait of one family’s journey over 40 years – and the woman at its centre who is at once its most energizing and most destructive force.
“The voices in the novel – both Cassie’s (the narrator) and Nina’s (her mother) – draw the reader into the story. Along with these compelling characters, one of the greatest strengths is Reeves’ urgent and poetic prose.
“Little Crosses doesn’t shy away from the contradictory, the messy, the human. It is a moving and magnetic depiction of family and the staggering capacities for cruelty and love inherent within.”
Jurors: Daniel Allen Cox, Wendy McLellan, Anuja Varghese
Other Prizes Awarded at the 2023 QWF Gala
QWF also bestowed the honorary 2024 QWF Judy Mappin Community Award on Christopher DiRaddo, for his unwavering dedication to nurturing the English-language literary arts and literary communities in Quebec.
The carte blanche Prize was awarded to Lena Palacios for her work of creative non-fiction, “Playtime in Carmella’s Room: A Memoir,” published in issue 49 of carte blanche. The $500 prize is awarded annually in recognition of an outstanding submission by a Quebec writer, artist, or translator to carte blanche, QWF’s online literary journal, carte blanche. The second-place prize of $200 went to Erin Robinsong for her poem “BONE-EATING SNOT FLOWER” (Issue 48) and the third-place prize of $150 to Deborah Ostrovsky for her translation of Zoologies by Laurence Leduc-Primeau (Issue 49).
Maxence Gagné of Champlain College St. Lambert won the QWF College Writers Award for his short story “Echoes of Leïla.” Supported by Champlain, Dawson, Heritage, John Abbott, Marianopolis, and Vanier Colleges, the award recognizes outstanding literary achievement by one student from one of the sponsoring colleges. The winner receives a cash prize of $1,000 and publication in carte blanche.
Media Kit
For winners’ photos and book covers and juror comments for all finalists, please visit our media kit.