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Coldstream poet Laisha Rosnau has made the short list for a prestigious literary award.
The Shevchenko Foundation has announced Rosnau’s poetry collection, Our Familiar Hunger, has been shortlisted for the 2020 Kobzar Book Award.
The Kobzar Book Award is presented biennially to Canadian authors who explore the Ukrainian Canadian experience in their work, whether that be literary non-fiction, poetry, young readers literature, play, screenplay or musical.
In its exploration of the lives of Eastern European women, Our Familiar Hunger tests and confirms the will, struggle and fortitude of generations of women, both contemporary and historical.
The poems shift in time and place, moving from the Russian Revolution to Holodomor, the massive famine in Ukraine, to early Ukrainian immigration to Canada and later, prisoner camps across Canada during the First World War.
The collection explores different types of hunger and what it means to be hungry, whether that be literal hunger for sustenance, sexual hunger and desire, or hunger for love.
Rosnau is the author of The Sudden Weight of Snow, which received an honourable mention for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award.
Her first collection of poetry, Notes on Leaving, won the 2005 Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award. Her second, Lousy Explorers, was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award for best book of poetry by a Canadian woman.
Our Familiar Hunger was the winner of the 2019 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.
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