With three full days left to submit to our Short Fiction and Poetry Contests, you might need an extra push to finish up your entries. PRISM international has been fortunate enough to publish many emerging and established writers through our contests, as well as our regular submissions. We’ve compiled a list of some notable achievements of our a few of past winners, a kind of “where are they now?”
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Short Fiction Contest Winners
Kate Cayley
Last year’s Short Fiction Contest winner Kate Cayley had a big year: she won first place in our contest, won the 2015 Trillium Award for her book How You Were Born, and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. You can read an excerpt from here story here.
The 2012 Short Fiction winner Josie Sigler was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her winning story “Ms.Pacman” and published her book The Galaxie and Other Rides with Livingston Press.
Eliza Robertson won the 2010 Short Fiction Contest for her story “Roadnotes”. She attended University of East Anglia, where she received the 2011 Man Booker Scholarship. In 2013, her story “We Walked On Water” co-won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her first collection of short stories, Wallflowers, was shortlisted for the Canadian Authors Association Emerging Writer Award, the Danuta Gleed Short Story Prize Prize, the East Anglia Book Award, and selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice. In 2015, she was named by Joseph Boyden as one of five emerging writers for the Writers’ Trust Five x Five program.
Poetry Contest Winners
Phoebe Wang
2015 Poetry Contest Winner Phoebe Wang is no stranger to the CanLit scene. Her work has appeared in Arc Poetry, Canadian Literature, CV2, Descant, Grain, Malahat Review, Ricepaper Magazine, THIS Magazine and Diaspora Dialogues’ TOK 6: Writing the New Toronto anthology. In an interview with Poetry Editor Dominique Bernier-Cormier, Wang discussed how “[p]artially thanks to the Prism prize, a few editors have shown interest in” the manuscript she’s working on, titled Admission Requirements.
Jordan Mounteer, winner of the 2014 Poetry Contest, was a finalist for The Malahat Review’s 2015 Open Season Award in Poetry. His work has appeared in Lemon Hound, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Arc, Grain, Prairie Fire, and The Antigonish Review.
Deanna Young won PRISM’s 2013 Poetry Contest and published her third book of poetry, House Dreams, in 2014 with Brick Books. House Dreams was a finalist for the 2015 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the Archibald Lampman Award and the City of Ottawa Book Awards.
Creative Non-fiction Contest Winners
JonArno Lawson
In 2012, JonArno Lawson won first place in PRISM’s Creative Non-fiction Contest for his essay “Horse Camp” and in 2013 his book Down at the Bottom of the Box was mentioned by CBC as one of the “Five Must-Read Books” for 2013.
Madeline Sonik won PRISM international’s 2009 Creative Non-fiction Contest and answered some questions here about how the contest helped her writing.
Russell Wangersky won PRISM international’s 2003 and 2004 Creative Non-fiction Contest and has since published four books. He’s a four-time National Magazine Award winner, been longlisted and shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and in 2009, Burning Down the House won the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-fiction. He was PRISM international’s 2015 Creative Non-fiction judge.
There’s still time to submit to our Short Fiction and Poetry Contests, so send us your best work by February 1st, midnight PT!