Deadline: May 1, 2014 (postmarked)
Prize: $1000 CAD to one winner
Entry fee:
$25 CAD for Canadian entries
$30 USD for entries from the USA
$35 USD for entries from elsewhere

Additional entries are $15 CAD (from anywhere).

Emerging poets who have yet to publish their poetry in book form are encouraged to enter up to three poems of 60 lines each. Entry fee includes a one-year subscription to The Malahat Review.

Read full contest guidelines on the Malahat website.

Malahat volunteer Alexandra Handley recently spoke with Julie Bruck, past recipient of a Governor General's Literary Award, on the creative process and the importance of writing contests. Bruck is the judge of this year's Far Horizons Award for Poetry.

AH: Did you submit to contests like the Far Horizons Award for Poetry when you first began publishing and sharing your work?

JB: Contests were less widespread when I started to send out work, but I did enter some, back when our poems had to be weighed on non-digital balance scales by a live human at the post office. Now that I think about it, there was something satisfying about having to let go of the physical object that way. Perhaps it made it easier to see the work as an entity separate from its maker, and for this reason, made the initial rejections easier to bear.

Read the rest of Julie's interview on the Malahat website.

Poetry

Malahat volunteer Karen Bannister recently spoke with Joelle Barron on winning the 2014 Open Season Award for Poetry with her poem, "A Girl Like This Might Have Loved Glenn Gould."

KB: What do you pinpoint as the inspiration behind this poem? How did it come to you?

JB: The inspiration was definitely a lifetime obsession with Glenn Gould. I've just always found him really interesting, and I'll admit to having a pretty intense crush on him. I found out that he did a lot of traveling around Northern Ontario, to all these places that are so familiar to me. I was fascinated with what I perceived to be his fascination with where I'm from. Then I listened to "The Idea of North," the radio doc he did for the CBC in 1967 about people living in northern Canada. And then I had a poem!

Read the rest of Joelle's interview on the Malahat website.

Fiction

Malahat volunteer Sarah Brennan-Newell recently spoke with Tajja Isen on winning the 2014 Open Season Award for Fiction with her story, "The Anxiety of Influence."

SBN: What drew you to writing about the creation and maintenance of identity? Can you speak more broadly to the role of the other in defining the self? 

TI: I think that the creation and upkeep of identity is a pretty widespread and enduring preoccupation, but its manifestation in “The Anxiety of Influence” owes a lot to context—at the time of writing, I was a career-baffled undergrad who happened to be reading a lot of Freud, and the story is partially a product of that flammable-sounding combination. I was taking a creative writing course and, immersed in the theory I was reading, knew I wanted to play with its practical implications in fictional form.

Read the rest of Tajja's interview on the Malahat website.

Creative Nonfiction

Malahat marketing assistant Rachel Lallouz recently spoke with Kelly Cooper on winning the 2014 Open Season Award for Creative Nonfiction with her memoir, "Ten Easy Steps."

RL: Did you find that writing this piece was a cathartic process for you?

KC: I wasn't trying to purge myself of anger or sadness as I was writing. Perhaps I was looking to do the opposite and hold my brothers close to me. Grief is a manifestation of the deep love I feel for those men. When I was a teenager, walking through a poplar bluff in one of our pastures, I came upon a tree with a length of barbed wire that appeared to have grown through its trunk. Every spring, with each thin layer of cambium that formed, that tree pressed closer and closer to the fence beside it; enough years passed and the wire was enveloped. The tree lived on, the fence rusted and finally fell, but that length of wire remained, running through the heartwood. I'd be content to be like that poplar and grow around the barb.

Read the rest of Kelly's interview on the Malahat website.