2013 CBC Poetry Prize: And the winner is...

CBC Books, along with our partners the Canada Council for the Arts, Air Canada's enRoute magazine and The Banff Centre, are happy to announce the winners of the 2013 CBC Poetry Prize and Prix de poésie Radio-Canada.

There is one Grand Prize winner and four runners-up in each language. Winners were selected from over 2,000 entries received from across the country. 

In English, the Grand Prize winner is James Scoles of Winnipeg, MB for "The Trailer."

The jury was comprised of poets Sue Goyette, David McGimpsey, and Anne Michaels. They had this to say about his poem:

"With wit and memorable precision, 'The Trailer' takes a setting which is not familiar to poetry, adopts its argot, houses it within a firm structural base and elegantly chronicles the pain inherent in the concept of 'success'. Each quatrain expresses the fullness of an individual life, and indicates not just the conscious suffering of the speaker, but the ways in which class-orientated discrimination denies the subjectivity of the individual."

James Scoles teaches creative writing at the University of Winnipeg. He has travelled, lived, and worked in over 90 countries, and his writing — fiction, poetry, and literary non-fiction — has appeared in journals, magazines, and newspapers in Japan, the USA, Australia, Ireland, and Canada, and has been nominated for the Western and National Magazine Awards, The Journey Prize, and the Pushcart Prize.

James Scoles will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, and his prize-winning story will be published in the October edition of enRoute Magazine. He will also receive a two-week residency at The Banff Centre's Leighton Artists' Colony. 

The French-language winner was also announced this morning. The winner of the Prix de poésie Radio-Canada is Louise Gagnon for "Le fruit, le don".