Laisha Rosnau's poetry collection Our Familiar Hunger has won the 2020 Kobzar Book Award, a biennial award that gives $25,000 to an outstanding book about the Ukrainian Canadian experience.

Our Familiar Hunger is the B.C.-based poet's fourth collection. It tells the history of generations of women and how they are bound by their strength, resilience and the transfer of pain.

"These are poems that cut to the bone, linking lives marked by landscape and gender and history across continents and across generations," said author Nino Ricci, who judged the prize alongside Matt Bowes and Lindy Ledohowski.

Rosnau's collection won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, an award for the best poetry book from British Columbia and Yukon, in 2019.

Her previous work includes the novel Little Fortress and poetry collections Pluck and Lousy Explorers.

Rosnau lives in Coldstream, B.C., where her family are the caretakers of the Bishop Wild Bird Sanctuary.