Goose Lane Editions and the icehouse poetry board are thrilled to announce that Qurat Dar (she/they) is the winner of the inaugural Claire Harris Poetry Prize!
Designed to enhance the visibility of debut poetry collections by poets from Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities, the Claire Harris Poetry Prize includes a cash award of $1,000 and publication of the manuscript through icehouse poetry, followed by a series of public readings across Canada. Dar’s stunning manuscript Non-Prophet was chosen from dozens of entries and is scheduled for publication in the fall of 2025.
“Non-Prophet aims to embody a Muslim Gothic envisioned through the lenses of womanhood, immigration, and the tension between devotion and doubt,” says Dar.
Qurat Dar was Mississauga’s Youth Poet Laureate from 2021 to 2023 and the 2020 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam (CIPS) National Champion. Her poetry has been published by Canthius, Augur, and Anathema, and shown at the Art Gallery of Mississauga.
“I'm still a little in disbelief at winning the Claire Harris Prize. It was both unexpected and deeply validating. Publishing a poetry collection has always felt intimidating and out of reach, and it's amazing to think I'll have a book out in the world.”
This year’s winner was chosen by celebrated poet Kazim Ali (Sukun), who will work with Dar to edit the collection for publication. “These gorgeous and heartfelt lyrics speak of quintessentially human and Canadian experiences and are very much in the spirit of Claire Harris's bold and innovative work,” Ali says of Non-Prophet.
Congratulations, Qurat, on your phenomenal manuscript. We’re so excited to work with you!
About Kazim Ali
Celebrated poet, editor, and essayist Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom to Muslim parents of Indian, Iranian, and Egyptian descent. He spent most of his early life in Canada and now lives in the United States and teaches at the University of California, San Diego.
Ali is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, fiction, essays, and cross-genre texts. His collections of poetry include Sukun: New and Selected Poems; Sky Ward, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; and The Far Mosque, winner of the Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award. His books of non-fiction include Silver Road; Fasting for Ramadan; and Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water, winner of the Banff Mountain Book Award for Environmental Literature. Ali is also an accomplished translator and has edited several anthologies and books of criticism.
About Claire Harris
Claire Harris was a decorated Black Trinidadian Canadian poet who emigrated to Canada in 1966. Her poetry is known for verse techniques such as contrasting prose and poetry and for alternating voices, ranging from British English to Trinidadian Creole. Harris’s innovative poetry dramatized and made public the issues of injustice in colonial and post-colonial settings and the psychological struggles experienced by racialized women who face violence and oppression. She mentored numerous young poets as both a teacher and an editor at Dandelion and blue buffalo.
Harris’s eight books of poetry include Fables from the Women’s Quarters and Translation into Fiction, both released in 1984. Her later work included Drawing Down a Daughter and She, which combined prose and poetry to give urgency to the search for a cultural home. During her lifetime, her work won international acclaim, was widely anthologized in Canada, the US, and abroad, and was translated into German and Hindi. Harris won the Commonwealth Award for Poetry for the Americas Region, the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Award for Poetry, the Alberta Culture Poetry Prize, and the Alberta Culture Special Award. She was also a finalist for a Governor General’s Award in 1992.