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About the Award

Established in memory of writer Bronwen Wallace, this award has a proven track record of helping talented developing authors get their first book deal. Two $10,000 prizes will be given for outstanding works of unpublished poetry and short fiction.


The RBC Bronwen Wallace Award is sponsored by RBC Emerging Artists. The initiative supports organizations that provide the best opportunity for artists to advance in their projected career paths. Providing key funding across artistic genres, RBC contributes to the positive, sustained impact of the arts in building strong, diverse, and vibrant communities. Since 2015, more than 28,000 artists have been supported through these programs.  

2022 Winner

Patrick James
Errington

Jury Citation

“Patrick James Errington’s ‘If Fire, Then Bird’ confronts embered landscapes of memory and loss in sonorous, sensory-rich language. These poems move with undeniable grace and attention, subtly adopting and subverting lyrical and pastoral tropes to pose tough questions about the fragile boundaries between health and illness, presence and absence, place and displacement. Like figures walking through the smoke from a burning field, Errington’s poems emerge with remarkable definition, clarity, and surprise.”

—2022 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award Poetry Jury (Tenille K. Campbell, Michael Prior, and Suzannah Showler)

Author Page

2022 Winner

Teya
Hollier 

Jury Citation

“A tender, skillful, and moving storytelling achievement, ‘Watching, Waiting’ perfectly captures a child’s voice and understanding of the adult world. The bonds in a delayed father-daughter relationship are so delicately explored that readers are given pause at every cautious movement and each unspoken word. Deftly navigating familial and spatial geographies of shame, solidarity, and race, Teya Hollier moves effortlessly from comparing parents’ skin colour, to secret candy, to the contrasting experiences of zombie and princess trick-or-treaters in a fine form of the unexpected.”

—2022 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award Short Fiction Jury (Erin Frances Fisher, Angélique Lalonde, and Derek Mascarenhas)

Author Page

2022 Finalists - Short Fiction

2022 Finalists - Poetry

Jury

Short Fiction
A jury composed of fiction writers Erin Frances Fisher, Angélique Lalonde, and Derek Mascarenhas read 189 anonymous submissions to select the finalists in the fiction category.

Jury

Poetry
A jury composed of poets Tenille K. Campbell, Michael Prior, and Suzannah Showler read 183 anonymous submissions to select the finalists in the poetry category.

About Bronwen Wallace

Bronwen Wallace (1945-1989) was a poet, short story writer, and mentor to many aspiring authors as a creative writing instructor at Queen’s University and St. Lawrence College in Kingston, ON. This prize was established in her honour in 1994 by a group of friends and colleagues. Wallace felt that writers should have more opportunities for recognition early in their careers and so this annual award is given to writers who have published poetry or prose in literary magazines or anthologies, but have not yet been published in book form.