Shani Mootoo, Garry Gottfriedson and Emily Austin to judge 2024 CBC Poetry Prize

Shani Mootoo, Garry Gottfriedson and Emily Austin will judge the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize.

The CBC Poetry Prize recognizes an original, unpublished poem or collection of poems. The submission will be judged as a whole and must be a maximum of 600 words (including titles).

The winner will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and have their work published on CBC Books.

Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.

The CBC Poetry Prize is open for submissions until June 1, 2024 at 4:59 p.m. ET. 

• The CBC Poetry Prize is open from April 1 to June 1

Mootoo is a writer and visual artist born in Ireland and raised in Trinidad who currently lives in Ontario. Her debut novel was 1997's Cereus Blooms at Night. Her novel Polar Vortex was shortlisted for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her other books include Cane | Fire, Moving Forward Sideways like a Crab and Valmiki's Daughter. In 2022, she won the Writers' Trust Engel Findley Award for fiction writers in the middle of their career. 

This is not the first time Mootoo is involved with the CBC Literary Prizes. She has previously served as a reader for the CBC Short Story Prize three times: in 2020, 2015 and 2007. 

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Mootoo's most recent poetry collection, Oh Witness Dey!, discusses the concept of "origin" through an exploration of history, displacements and legacy, starting with her own. With no record of how they got there and where they're originally from, Mootoo's great-great-grandparents were brought to Trinidad by the British.

• Shani Mootoo on chocolate, house chores and cryptic notes

Gottfriedson is from Kamloops, B.C. He is strongly rooted in his Secwépemc (Shuswap) cultural teachings. In the late 1980s, Gottfriedson studied under Allen Ginsberg, Marianne Faithfull and others at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He is the author of 13 books, including Skin Like Mine and Clinging to Bone. Gottfriedson received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) in 2023. His new poetry book, The Flesh of Ice, is forthcoming in September 2024.

Gottfriedson was also a reader for the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize.

• Secwépemc poet, residential school survivor Garry Gottfriedson says poetry was his 'saviour'

Gottfriedson's previous poetry collection Bent Back Tongue was published in 2022. The poems explore contemporary masculinity, politics and love — all with an unflinching eye on colonial history but also celebrating love, land, family and the self.

Emily Austin is an Ottawa-based writer. She studied English literature and library science at Western University. Her debut novel, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, was longlisted for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award and the Ottawa Book Award. Austin's second novel is Interesting Facts About Space.  

• Emily Austin's latest novel Interesting Facts About Space explores reckoning with fear and letting people in

She is also the author of the poetry collection Gay Girl Prayers. Gay Girl Prayers reclaims Catholic prayers and passages from the Bible to empower young women and members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community. At once sassy and funny, this book celebrates cultural and societal differences.  

LISTEN | Emily Austin talks to Q's Tom Power about her new poetry collection: 

Q12:19Emily Austin reads from Gay Girl Prayers

Plus, what’s your relationship like with holy texts? Canadian poet Emily Austin sat down and rewrote some parts of the Bible that didn’t sit right with her as a queer woman. She tells Tom what inspired her, and reads a poem from her new collection of poetry, “Gay Girl Prayers.”

The jury will select the shortlist and winner. A panel of established writers and editors from across Canada review the submissions and will determine the longlist from all the submissions. The longlist, shortlist and winner will be announced in fall 2024.

Last year's winner was Kyo Lee — the youngest ever CBC Poetry Prize winner — for her poem lotus flower blooming into breasts.

• Kyo Lee writes about being a queer Korean Canadian — now she's the youngest ever CBC Poetry Prize winner

The CBC Literary Prizes have been recognizing Canadian writers since 1979. Past winners include Susan Musgrave, Lorna Crozier, Alison Pick, Michael Ondaatje and Carol Shields.

• 16 famous Canadian writers who won CBC Literary Prizes

Need a little motivation to get you going? Subscribe to the CBC Poetry Prize newsletter for writing tips and support along the way.

If you're looking to submit to the Prix de poésie Radio-Canada, you can enter here. 

The 2025 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September and the 2025 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January.