Fred Wah

Winner of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence

Vancouver poet Fred Wah has published numerous books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. His work has been awarded the Governor-General’s Award, among others. He is a former Parliamentary Poet Laureate and on Officer of the Order of Canada. His best-known book is Diamond Grill, a biofiction about a small-town Chinese-Canadian café. is a door was awarded the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2020. Talonbooks recently published Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems 1961-1991, beholden: a poem as long as the river (a collaboration with Rita Wong), and the collected Music at the Heart of Thinking.

Jurors: Cathy Armstrong, Kevin Chong, and Dani Sidloski

Statement from the Jury: “With a publishing history that spans 60 years and a teaching career that lasted decades, Fred Wah’s impact on BC literature is long, wide, and deep. Wah’s work, which includes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and criticism, has often focused on hybridities of people, cultures, and form. In a province full of writers and readers with overlapping identities and histories, Wah shows us all how to plumb the hyphen for new meanings.”