Clockwise from top left: Oana Avasilichioaei, Madeleine Thien, Alisha Dukelow, Kaie Kellough
An exciting announcement for a crisp, fall morning: the finalists for the 2018 3Macs carte blanche Prize, as selected by juror and Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author Madeleine Thien, are Oana Avasilichioaei (poetry), Alisha Dukelow (fiction), and Kaie Kellough (poetry)! While we wait for the unveiling of the winner, we invite you to read their nominated publications: “Tracking Animal,” “loss of (her)self,“ and “Bow” (forthcoming), respectively.
The winner will be announced at the Quebec Writers’ Federation Gala on November 20 and will receive a cash prize and a trophy–originally handcrafted by Glen LeMesurier.
Oana Avasilichioaei’s practice is concerned with textuality, polylingual poetics, the social and political forces/voices of the polis, and the intermediary spaces between word, sound and image, exploring the transgressions of these terrains through poetry, translation, performance, and sound work. Her five poetry collections include We, Beasts (Wolsak & Wynn 2012, winner of the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry) and Limbinal (Talonbooks 2015), a hybrid, multi-genre poetic work on notions of borders, and her current book/beyond-the-book project is Eight Track (upcoming 2019), a poetic, sonic investigation of the multifold meanings of track and tracking. Also a translator, her most recent translation of Bertrand Laverdure’s Readopolis (BookThug, 2017) won the 2017 Governor General Literary Award.
Alisha Dukelow’s poetry and fiction has been published in journals such as The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, and PRISM international. In Montreal, or Tiotia:ke, the traditional territory of the Mohawk people, she is currently pursuing an MA in Creative Writing and English Literature and working on her first collection of poetry and poetic cross-genre.
Kaie Kellough is a Canadian poet and novelist. He was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, raised in Calgary, Alberta, and in 1998 moved to Montreal, Quebec, where he currently lives. Kellough has published two books of poetry, two audio recordings and a novel. He is a practitioner of vocal sound poetry.