Finalists for the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry: The Ridge and Old Gods

The 2023 Governor General's Literary Awards have been announced. In the poetry category, Harbour Publishing author Robert Bringhurst is a finalist for his book, The Ridge, which is intensely focused on the ecological past, present and future of the West Coast.

Nightwood Editions author Conor Kerr is also a finalist in the poetry category for his collection Old Gods, through which readers are situated in the Métis mindset: the old gods of the land are alive within the rivers, the birds, the hills and the prairies that surround us, and they’ll always be here.

The Governor General's Literary Awards (#GGBooks), administered by the Canada Council for the Arts, recognize Canada's best English and French books in seven categories. 

Robert Bringhurst is the winner of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and former Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, trained initially in the sciences at MIT but has made his career in the humanities. He is also an officer of the Order of Canada and the recipient of two honorary doctorates. He lives on Quadra Island, BC.

Conor Kerr is a Métis Ukrainian writer. A member of the Métis Nation of Alberta, he is a descendant of the Lac Ste. Anne Métis and the Papaschase Cree Nation. His Ukrainian family are settlers in Treaty Four and Six territories in Saskatchewan. In 2020 he received The Fiddlehead's Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize and in 2021 was awarded The Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize. His work has been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry 2020 and Best Canadian Stories 2020 and published in literary magazines across Canada. He is the author of the poetry collection An Explosion of Feathers and the novel Avenue of Champions, which was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award, won a 2022 ReLit Award and was longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize.