It’s a strong start for the poetic career of Nelly Desmarais, who won the Émile-Nelligan prize on Monday evening for her first collection, Walk in a low voice. The jury also praised the work of two other authors who published a new work last year.
Mme Desmarais thus won a sum of $7,500 for this collection published last year by the publishing house The Quartermaster. The Émile-Nelligan Prize, created in 1979, aims to recognize the work of emerging poets under the age of 35.
The book transports its readers to the daily life of the author, a resident of the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district. It was in this sector that she recovered from a painful breakup, through enriching encounters, which allowed her to start afresh. It is also in an alley of this district that she suffered an attack, from which she recovered painfully.
This mixture of beauty and pain took the form of elegant prose, which seduced the jury of the Émile-Nelligan Foundation, made up of three renowned authors. “It’s the meeting of a sentimental journey with a place, people, and the meeting of pain, of the intimate, which also comes from an event in Hochelaga. It’s a crossroads of tension, emotion and calm that settles temporarily”, summarizes the president of the jury, Nicole Brossard, in an interview at the Duty.
The jury also praised the work of two other finalists, who won $500 in a ceremony Monday evening at the Grande Bibliothèque in Montreal.
Montrealer Frédéric Dumont, who received the Félix-Antoine-Savard award in 2016, was hailed for Minimum room, published by Les Herbes Rouges. The collection examines several timeless social issues, such as individualism and class relations, but also the effects of the health crisis on our social relations. The book thus approaches “what it is to live in a present contaminated by renewal, uncertainty, the true and the false. The most difficult emotions to experience are those of the 21st century.e century, so you have to draw your own hope,” points out Nicole Brossard, herself a poet.
Andréane Frenette-Vallières completes the list with her third book, You will choose the mountains, published by the publishing house Le Noroît. The poetic essay offers a dialogue between feminist studies and the love of nature of its author, who notably won the Félix-Leclerc prize for poetry in 2019.