Crilling since 1979 “a north America poet of thirty-five or less for a collection published in French”, the Émile-Leligan Prize is awarded this year to Jonas Fortier. The jury rewarded him on Monday for Crazyhis third collection published at the Cravan goose. During an evening which took place at the atrium of the Maison du Council des Arts de Montréal, a scholarship of $ 7,500 and a medal in the image of the poet Émile Nelligan was allocated to him.
Born in Montreal in 1992, Jonas Fortier was a finalist at the Prix des Libraires du Québec in 2020 thanks to Transparent songs (L’Oie de Cravan, 2019) and winner of the international French-speaking poetry Yvan-Goll prize at the Paris poetry market for Earth curvature (Cravan goose, 2022). He co-hosts with Shawn Cotton and Hermine Ortega The Poetry Review Sometimes.
Nicole Brossard, president this year of the Jury of the Émile-Landan Prize, believes that the writing of Fortier “is always in balance between the meaning and the misinterpretation of reality by modulating the words so finely that it results from the pleasure of truth in constant movement, a nanojoie of the real which really matters”. To illustrate her point, the woman of letters quotes some verses Crazy : “When the news chain falls / at our feet it has nothing left / that orality or song / birds”.
At the time of the publication of the collection of Jonas Fortier, Yannick Marcoux, poetry critic Dutywrote: “Drawing their poetic matter from a daily life, sometimes suave, sometimes harmless, poems offer as many stories as characters, who benefit from the benevolence of the poetic body. [I]Lya, in the reminiscence of a past ready to arise, […] The striking recall of a timeless beauty, which does not belong to anyone if not to whom knows how to recognize it. »»
The other finalists
The jury, also composed of Carole David and Vincent Lambert, had selected two other finalists: Mégane Desrosiers and Angelina Guo, who wrote respectively Mouth to show a series of blades (Red herbs) and Appearance (The Quartanier). They received $ 500 each.
According to the jury, the Book of Desrosiers “offers to read in the urgency of the action of words. The writing with a knife grabs the poem in the emerging state to make it a bestiary whose cruel illuminations delight us ”. As for the collection of Guo, it is said that it “tracks down the truth of violence through a mixture of forms and languages. The plurilingual text becomes the place of appearance ”.
Last year, our collaborator Sarah-Louise Pelletier-Morin won the prize for her first collection, The cut flower market (The people).
