The Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence is now open!

The Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence serves to honour the memory of Austin Clarke (1934-2016). Clarke was, above all else, an exceptional writer, one who disrupted the expectations of what Canadian literature could and should become. His literary career was characterized by impressive productivity. In the span of his lifetime, he published eleven novels (including his 2002 Giller-winning The Polished Hoe), nine short story collections, two poetry collections, along with a number of memoirs. In this large body of work, he continually questioned the homogeneity implied with the development of a Canadian cultural establishment. He was deeply critical of the official Canadian position of multiculturalism, but to consider his work a “realist or sociological account of Black life in Canada” would be, as Paul Barrett notes in the introduction to his 2017 “‘Membering Austin Clarke: A Puritan Special Issue,” a fundamental misreading of the value of his writing. Although Clarke began his writing career as a reporter at the Timmins Daily Press and The Globe and Mail, his vast body of literary work has “never been realist, nor has it ever been reportage: it is a polyvocal, hybridizing, experimental, introspective, satirical, patriarchal, offensive, provocative and—at times—outraged artistic reflection on life in Canada” which “demands” a stylistic account.

We at The Ex-Puritan agree. We have long been admirers of Clarke’s work, and with this renaming our annual literary award, we want to encourage our readers and writers to think through what it means to rebuke the Canadian cultural establishment. We want our writers to continue Clarke’s legacy by reimagining the boundaries of Canadian literature. Equally important to this, however, is a focus on style. Although we divide this award by entries into fiction and poetry, we want our submitters to reimagine the boundaries of what fiction and poetry can look like. We actively encourage submissions that are experimental with form and unrelentingly demand an attention to their style. We believe that Austin Clarke would’ve wanted nothing less.

This year, the winners will be selected by CANISIA LUBRIN (for fiction) and LIZ HOWARD (for poetry). Past judges have included Billy-Ray Belcourt, Cody Caetano, Francesca Ekwuyasi, Jordan Abel, Casey Plett, and Doyali Islam. Winners in each category will receive:

First Prize: $1,000

Runner-up: $200

We will announce our shortlist at the end of November and announce the winners in December.

The deadline to enter is 11:59 p.m. on November 1, 2024. For full submission guidelines, visit our Submittable!

2024 Judges

FICTION: CANISIA LUBRIN is a writer, editor and teacher, author of five books, including The Dyzgraphxst and The World After Rain (M&S, 2025). Her work has received a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and Griffin Poetry Prize, among others. Lubrin has held fellowships at the Banff Centre, Civitella Ranieri, Literature Colloquium, and several universities. She is Asst. Professor and
coordinator of the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA in the School of English & Theatre Studies,
and poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart. Code Noir (Knopf, 2024) her fiction debut, contains 59
drawings by acclaimed visual artist, Torkwase Dyson.

POETRY: LIZ HOWARD is a poet, editor, and teacher. Her work explores Anishinaabe ways of knowing, cosmology, ecology, and the liberatory potentials of language as art. Her first collection, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, was shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Trillium Poetry Prize. She has completed creative writing and Indigenous arts residencies at the University of Toronto, the rare Charitable Research Reserve, the University of Winnipeg, McGill University, the University of Calgary, UBC Okanagan, Douglas College, Sheridan College, and for The Capilano Review. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Concordia University. She is of mixed settler and Anishinaabe heritage. Born and raised on Treaty 9 territory in Northern Ontario, she currently lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.