St. Boniface Elegies, book cover
The Canada Council for the Arts revealed the 2019 finalists for the Governor General’s Literary Awards (GGLA). The list includes UWinnipeg’s Dr. Catherine Hunter’s book of poetry, St. Boniface Elegies. The GGLA are one of the oldest and most prestigious literary awards programs in Canada. Her book is one of the 70 finalists that were selected by peer-assessment committees from some 1,400 books in seven categories in both English and French.
In four sections, St. Boniface Elegies traces Hunter’s relationships with her family and her community through poems about travel, love, illness, work, and the writing life.
“We congratulate Dr. Hunter on being a finalist for a Governor General’s Literary Award” said Dr. Glenn Moulaison, UWinnipeg Dean of Arts. “Writers are often told to write about what they know. In the case of St. Boniface Elegies, it is obvious that Dr. Hunter has taken this to heart. Writing about what you know means writing about what you experience, love, and miss, and read, and really just knowing what good writing is supposed to look like. We are lucky she shares her talent with our students.”
Hunter is a professor of English at UWinnipeg. Her earlier poetry collection Latent Heat won the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year Award, and four of the poems in St. Boniface Elegies, published earlier in CV2, won the Manitoba Magazine Award for Best Poem or Suite of Poems and earned Honorable Mention in the National Magazine Awards.
Her recent novel After Light (Signature) spans for generations of an Irish-American-Canadian family in a tale of love, war, trauma, and the power of art. She has also published several mysteries with Ravenstone/Turnstone, and recorded a spoken word CD (Rush Hour, from Cyclops Press, with a bonus track by The Weakerthans).
Her writing has also appeared in the journals The Malahat Review, Prism International, Essays on Canadian Writing, Matrix, West Coast Line, Prairie Fire, CV2, and Grain, and the anthologies The Echoing Years: Contemporary Poetry from Canada and Ireland; Post Prairie: An Anthology of New Poetry; Best Canadian Poems 2013; and Best Canadian Poems 2015.
She edited Exposed, an anthology of five new women poets, Best the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier, and, for 10 years, she was the editor of The Muses’ Company poetry press. Since 1991, she has enjoyed teaching literature and creative writing at UWinnipeg.
The winners will be revealed on October 29.
