B.C. poet Anne-Marie Turza wins $50K Writer’s Trust Board Fellowship

Victoria-based poet Anne-Marie Turza has won the inaugural Writers’ Trust Board Fellowship.

The initiative recognizes a mid-career writer's promise and body of work with a $50,000 prize and a two-week residency at the Leighton Artist Studios at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. 

The announcement was made at a fundraiser gala in Toronto on Jan. 15. The event raised over $600,000 in support of Writers' Trust programming and kicked off the organization's 50th anniversary celebrations.

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Turza is a nurse, poet and author of The Quiet, Fugue with Bedbug and a chapbook, Slip Minute. She was a finalist for both the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in 2011 and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award in 2014. 

"As a nurse, I'm called on to be very practical, evidence-based ... and a person who will dependably do the safest thing in whatever the given circumstance might be. I take this work very seriously," said Turza in an acceptance speech.

"I also take poetry seriously and I go to poetry when I want the opposite of nursing. I'm very serious about being a student and wanting to feel like a novice in relation to poetry and I think that the genre is very welcoming to writers like me. Elasticity is one of poetry's chief characteristics."

A jury comprised of Canadian writers Esi Edugyan, Charlotte Gray and Wayne Johnston selected Turza as the recipient of the fellowship.

“Across the last decade, Anne-Marie Turza has become one of the most striking and idiosyncratic voices in Canadian poetry. Her sensibility is unmistakable: oblique, funny, touched with an unforced strangeness that feels like a genuinely new way of seeing," the jury said in a statement.

"There is often a fairytale quality to her imagery, a surreality; at other turns, she transforms the grit of everyday life into a glorious marvel. Turza is one of our finest poets, a visionary whose work has the texture of prophecy.”

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The Writers’ Trust of Canada was founded in 1976 by a group of writers, including Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, David Young, Graeme Gibson and Pierre Berton. It offers prizes, grants, a residency and career development programs for Canadian writers.

“As an alumna of our programming, Turza benefited at the very beginning of her career from her nomination for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award, which led her to publish her debut collection. We are proud to support her again as she approaches mid-career and excited to read her future contributions to the Canadian literary canon,” said Writers' Trust Board of Directors chair Marla Lehberg.   

In 2025, more than $375,000 was given out across seven prizes, recognizing fiction, nonfiction and poetry.