The shortlists for the Pat Lowther and Gerald Lampert Memorial Awards announced.

The league of Canadian Poets has announced the 2010 shortlists for the Pat Lowther and Gerald Lampert Memorial Awards. Each award carries a prize of $1,000 and the winners will be announced June 11th-13th during the annual league of Canadian Poets festival and conference in Toronto.

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The 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist announced.

In honour of the Griffin Poetry prize's tenth anniversary, the amount of the honorarium has increased from $100,000 to $200,000 and for the first time, participants in the poetry readings will be awarded $10,000 to emphasize the value and importance of the readings themselves and to honour the poets' contributions to the genre. The readings will take place on June 2nd and the winners will be awarded on June 3rd. The nominees for the Griffin Poetry Prize include 3 Canadians and 4 international poets and are as follows:

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Dennis Cooley Night Table Recommendations

Too Bad by Robert Kroetsch (University of Alberta)

Kroetsch has created a lot of wonderful stuff and he keeps doing something different. In this, his latest book, he writes an hilarious autobiography of sorts in short and highly readable poems. They combine childhood memories and often embarrassing stories about his life as an adult writer. If at some point you don't laugh out loud or feel a catch in your thoughts you aren't reading. Almost everyone has noted the humour in Kroetsch's books; we have less often noticed the anguish that is in them. This book gives us both in a fresh and winning way.

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P.K. Page dead at 93

P.K. Page's formidable career spanned almost 70 years, commencing during the heyday of Canadian modernism in the 1940s and enduring well into the 21st century.

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