Two poets with connection to St. John's are on the longlist for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize.
CBC Books, CBC’s online home for literary content, together with its partners, the Canada Council for the Arts and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, announced the longlist Thursday.
The poets with connections to Newfoundland and Labrador who appear on the Longlist are:
Matthew Hollett of Montreal — raised in Corner Brook and formerly of St. John’s — is nominated for "Tickling the Scar."
Hollett is a writer and photographer recently transplanted from St. John’s to Montreal. His first book, "Album Rock," was published in 2018 by Boulder Books.
He has won several NL writing awards, including the 2017 NLCU Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers for "Optic Nerve," a collection of poems (not yet published) about photography and seeing. He also won the 2018 Cox & Palmer SPARKS Creative Writing Award, and the 2019 VANL-CARFAC Critical Eye Award.
His work has most recently appeared in Prism International and The Malahat Review.
"Album Rock," is a work of creative nonfiction and poetry about a curious photograph taken in northern Newfoundland in the 1850s.
Sharon King-Campbell of St. John’s is nominated for "Field Notes."
King-Campbell, who grew up in Ottawa, is a writer, theatre artist and storyteller who divides her time between St. John’s and Winterton. Her writing has appeared in Riddle Fence, WORD, and on stages across Newfoundland and Labrador.
She holds a bachelor of fine arts in theatre and a masters in creative writing from Memorial University, and is currently pursuing a PhD in English.
She was a winner in both the 2019 and 20 Arts & Letters Awards, and won the 2017 Rhonda Payne Award in recognition of her theatre work. Her first book of poetry, "This Is How It Is," will be published by Breakwater Books in 2021.
The finalists for this year’s prize will be announced on Nov. 5.
In addition to a cash prize of $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Grand Prize winner will receive a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and will be published on the CBC Books website. The four runners-up will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and will be published on CBC Books.
