Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize finalists
March 21st, 2019
Award winner Laisa Rosnau’s latest poetry collection Our Familiar Hunger (Nightwood Editions 2018) is a finalist for this year’s Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. The poems celebrate the strength and struggles, and the will and fortitude of women. Publicity for the book adds, “These poems are memories of reclaimed history and attempts at starting over in a new place. They are the fractured reality of trickle-down inheritance, studies of the epigenetic grief we carry and the myriad ways that interfere or interpret our best attempts.”
Rosnau’s first collection of poetry, Notes on Leaving (Nightwood 2004) won the 2005 Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award. Her second, Lousy Explorers (Nightwood 2009) was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award for best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. And her third poetry book Pluck (Nightwood 2014) was nominated for the national Raymond Souster poetry award.
Rosnau also writes fiction and her first novel, The Sudden Weight of Snow (McClelland and Stewart 2002) received an honourable mention for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award.
Laisha Rosnau was born in Quebec in 1972. She grew up in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. As well as full collections of poetry, Rosnau has published two limited edition chapbooks: getaway girl (Greenboathouse Books 2002) and This Glossy Animal (Baseline Press 2013).
The other finalists for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize are Fred Wah and Rita Wong for beholden, a poem as long as the river (Talonbooks), Shazia Hafiz Ramji for Port of Being (Invisible Publishing), Eve Joseph for Quarrels (Anvil Press) and Onjana Yawnghwe for The Small Way (Caitlin Press).
The winners will be announced at the BC Book Prizes Gala on Saturday the 11th of May, 2019, at the Pinnacle Hotel Harbourfront in Vancouver.
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