Home
Don McKay wins the 2011 BMO Winterset Award
23 March 2012- Gaspereau Press author Don McKay has won the 2011 BMO Winterset Award for his collection of essays The Shell of the Tortoise. His win was announced yesterday at a ceremony at Government House in St. John's, Newfoundland. Administered by the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council (NLAC), the BMO Winterset Award is a $10,000 prize presented annually to celebrate excellence in writing in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. The shortlist for the award also included authors Edward Riche for Easy to Like (Anansi Press) and Mark Callanan for Gift Horse (Véhicule Press).
Don McKay's The Shell of the Tortoise continues his investigation into the relationship between poetry and wilderness, particularly into the characteristics of metaphor as a tool. "Art occurs whenever a tool attempts to metamorphose into an animal"; asserts McKay in an essay on the myth of Hermes and his tortoise-shell lyre. He also takes us to the fossil beds of Newfoundland's Mistaken Point to consider the fault line between scientific rigour and the poetic capacity for astonishment; over a buggy, boggy portage with Duncan Campbell Scott, surveying Canadian poetry's complex relationship with wilderness; to the imagined film set of From Here to Infinity to reflect on metaphor's success in communicating the vastness of deep time, vastness which raw data fails to transmit; and into the Muskwa Assemblage, a poetic landscape which models his assertion that "In poetry, there is no 'been there, done that'; everything is wilderness.";
Don McKay is a poet, essayist, teacher and editor. He has published about a dozen books in a career that spans four decades. He has twice won the Governor General's Literary Awards for poetry and won the Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip in 2007. His previous essay collections include the Governor General's shortlisted Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry & Wilderness and Deactivated West 100. McKay lives in St. John's, Newfoundland.
The BMO Winterset Award honours the memory of Sandra Fraser Gwyn, a St. John's-born social historian and author who did much to promote national awareness of the arts in Newfoundland and Labrador. Her husband, journalist and author Richard Gwyn, established the award in 2000, naming it for the historic house on Winter Avenue, St. John's, where Sandra Fraser Gwyn spent her childhood years.
Don McKay's The Shell of the Tortoise continues his investigation into the relationship between poetry and wilderness, particularly into the characteristics of metaphor as a tool. "Art occurs whenever a tool attempts to metamorphose into an animal"; asserts McKay in an essay on the myth of Hermes and his tortoise-shell lyre. He also takes us to the fossil beds of Newfoundland's Mistaken Point to consider the fault line between scientific rigour and the poetic capacity for astonishment; over a buggy, boggy portage with Duncan Campbell Scott, surveying Canadian poetry's complex relationship with wilderness; to the imagined film set of From Here to Infinity to reflect on metaphor's success in communicating the vastness of deep time, vastness which raw data fails to transmit; and into the Muskwa Assemblage, a poetic landscape which models his assertion that "In poetry, there is no 'been there, done that'; everything is wilderness.";
Don McKay is a poet, essayist, teacher and editor. He has published about a dozen books in a career that spans four decades. He has twice won the Governor General's Literary Awards for poetry and won the Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip in 2007. His previous essay collections include the Governor General's shortlisted Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry & Wilderness and Deactivated West 100. McKay lives in St. John's, Newfoundland.
The BMO Winterset Award honours the memory of Sandra Fraser Gwyn, a St. John's-born social historian and author who did much to promote national awareness of the arts in Newfoundland and Labrador. Her husband, journalist and author Richard Gwyn, established the award in 2000, naming it for the historic house on Winter Avenue, St. John's, where Sandra Fraser Gwyn spent her childhood years.
Submitted on March 23, 2012 in By David.
