Tom Wayman Awarded the 2026 Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize

Eurithe Purdy and the Al Purdy A-frame Association (APAFA) are pleased to announce that Tom Wayman has been awarded the 2026 Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize for his collection Out of the Ordinary (Harbour Publishing). The $10,000 prize recognizes the most outstanding new book of poetry published in Canada in 2025 by an established poet with five or more published poetry collections.

Speaking from his home in the West Kootenays, Tom Wayman was thrilled to learn his book had been selected for the 2026 award. “I’m especially honoured,” said Wayman, ”to be awarded the Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize since, in my study where I write each day, a framed photo of Al glowers down at me—keeping my writing honest, I like to think. Purdy was helpful to me as a beginning writer in two ways. First, when I was still a grad student, he named an anthology he edited after the title of a poem of mine, “Fifteen Winds,” which gave me a huge boost in confidence. And he included me in his 1971 collection of Canadian poets under 30, Storm Warning, a kindness that led to my first book being accepted. Second, the conversational tone of many of Purdy’s poems—a compositional technique that looks easy to craft, but isn’t—has always been a model for me: nobody else in the history of English-language literature beats Purdy at this means to create a poetry anyone can enjoy.”

The winning title was selected by a jury comprised of Susan Musgrave, Sid Marty, and A.F. Moritz, the recipient of the 2025 prize for Great Silent Ballad. Moritz praised the collection, saying, “Since his 1973 debut, Waiting for Wayman, Tom Wayman has written with increasing genius, giving us ever-transforming poetry that remains true to itself. Out of the Ordinary is a new stage on Wayman's way, and one of the freshest, most beautiful and generous yet. It draws untold riches out of the ordinary, but Wayman departs from "ordinary" experience only by reaching into its own depths. For example, he visits a cathedral, as everyone does in one way or another, and his account becomes an embrace of all human creativity, including his own poetry: "each constituent song or tune / is itself a sanctuary, bolstering those who enter / to endure, improve and savour / more of the world.”

“I am delighted with this choice, and I think Al would be too,” said Eurithe Purdy upon learning of the jurors’ decision. “Back in 1971, Al included Tom Wayman in his anthology of young poets to watch, Storm Warning. Tom’s long and distinguished career has certainly justified that choice as well as this present one.”

Tom Wayman’s Out of the Ordinary captures how the everyday can contain the extraordinary. Set against a turbulent twenty-first century marked by a global pandemic, climate crises, economic inequality, and social strain, the collection explores how such extraordinary developments can both arise from and affect the ordinary objects, environments, and human relationships that surround us. The sections of this collection investigate some responses to this century’s quandaries, the enduring mysteriousness of nature as well as of our historic and cultural worlds, and what we find if we imaginatively enter a carrot seed or a raindrop. “Poets are the janitors of the human heart,” Wayman maintains in a poem of that name, and he indeed demonstrates how poetry can make the ordinary shine brightly even in these turbulent decades.

Tom Wayman’s prolific literary career includes more than twenty poetry collections, three collections of critical and cultural essays, three books of short fiction, a novel, and editing six poetry anthologies. He received British Columbia’s 2022 George Woodcock Award for Lifetime Achievement in the literary arts. In 2015, he was named a Vancouver Literary Landmark, with a plaque on the city’s Commercial Drive commemorating his championing of people writing for themselves about their daily employment. He won the Western Canada Jewish Book Awards prize for fiction in 2016 (for the short story collection, The Shadows We Mistake for Love) and for poetry in 2023 (for Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time). His memoir, The Road to Appledore (or How I Went Back to The Land Without Ever Having Lived There in the First Place), was published in 2024. Born in Hawkesbury, Ontario, Wayman lives in Winlaw, B.C. For a complete biography, visit www.tomwayman.com

Established in 2024 by Eurithe Purdy and administered by the Al Purdy A-frame Association, the Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize was created to preserve Al Purdy’s literary legacy and celebrate the achievements of outstanding Canadian poets. Over his prolific career, Purdy authored over 30 volumes of poetry, a memoir, a novel, essays, and various anthologies. He was awarded the Order of Canada in 1982 and won the League of Canadian Poets' Voice of the Land Award, recognizing his contributions to Canadian poetry. A generous endowment from Eurithe Purdy, overseen by the Al and Eurithe Purdy Fund, will support the $10,000 annual prize and help foster a lasting appreciation of poetic excellence in Canada.