SAAG ARTS WRITING PRIZE RECEPTION | VIRTUAL
August 12 | 6 - 7 PM MST | FREE
ACCESS THE EVENT LINK
Join us for this online reception to celebrate the writers of the 2021 SAAG Arts Writing Prize. Writers from across Canada submitted their work to three categories: Arts Writing, Poetry & Prose, and Aruna D’Souza (for self-identified BIPOC writers), and we’re excited to announce this year’s winners.
Attendees will receive a copy of the 2021 SAAG Arts Writing Prize Reader, published in-house at the gallery. This publication is an impressive collection of today’s emerging voices, sharing an array of perspectives and insightful critiques. Excerpts from the winning works will be read during the reception, with space for open conversation with the writers.
SAAG ARTS WRITING PRIZE WINNERS
This year's winner of the Aruna D’Souza Writing Prize is Moni Brar!
Moni Brar, A Body at Rest
Born in rural India, Moni Brar is a Punjabi-Canadian writer, educator, and farmer who gratefully divides her time between the unsurrendered territories of the Treaty 7 Region and the Syilx Okanagan Nation. Her writing explores the interrelation of time, place and identity, the friction of living in the in-betweenness of two cultures, diasporan guilt, religious violence, and the legacy of transgenerational trauma resulting from colonization. She believes in the possibility of healing through art and is inspired by writers who take an oppositional stance and work towards decolonizing western frameworks of culture, gender, and identity.
This year's winner of the Poetry & Prose prize is Shazia Hafiz Ramji!
Shazia Hafiz Ramji, L'ordre du jour
Shazia Hafiz Ramji is a PhD student in English at the University of Calgary, where she is researching listening, aurality, and kinship in Canadian literature. She grew up in Kenya, England, and the UAE before arriving as an uninvited guest on the ancestral territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver). Shazia was named as a “writer to watch” by the CBC. She is the author of Port of Being, a finalist for the 2019 Vancouver Book Award, BC Book Prizes (Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She is a co-editor for Watch Your Head, an anthology on the climate crisis and is at work on a novel.
