The 2026 Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence is Open!
The Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence is now open!
The Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence serves to honour the memory of Austin Clarke (1934-2016). Clarke was, above all else, an exceptional writer, one who disrupted the expectations of what Canadian literature could and should become. His literary career was characterized by impressive productivity. In the span of his lifetime, he published eleven novels (including his 2002 Giller-winning The Polished Hoe), nine short story collections, two poetry collections, along with a number of memoirs. In this large body of work, he continually questioned the homogeneity implied with the development of a Canadian cultural establishment. He was deeply critical of the official Canadian position of multiculturalism, but to consider his work a “realist or sociological account of Black life in Canada” would be, as Paul Barrett notes in the introduction to his 2017 “‘Membering Austin Clarke: A Puritan Special Issue,” a fundamental misreading of the value of his writing. Although Clarke began his writing career as a reporter at the Timmins Daily Press and The Globe and Mail, his vast body of literary work has “never been realist, nor has it ever been reportage: it is a polyvocal, hybridizing, experimental, introspective, satirical, patriarchal, offensive, provocative and—at times—outraged artistic reflection on life in Canada” which “demands” a stylistic account.
We at The Ex-Puritan agree. We have long been admirers of Clarke’s work, and with this renaming our annual literary award, we want to encourage our readers and writers to think through what it means to rebuke the Canadian cultural establishment. We want our writers to continue Clarke’s legacy by reimagining the boundaries of Canadian literature. Equally important to this, however, is a focus on style. Although we divide this award by entries into fiction and poetry, we want our submitters to reimagine the boundaries of what fiction and poetry can look like. We actively encourage submissions that are experimental with form and unrelentingly demand an attention to their style. We believe that Austin Clarke would’ve wanted nothing less.
This year, the winners will be selected by Kai Thomas (for fiction) and jaye simpson (for poetry). Past judges have included Iryn Tushabe and Faith Arkorful. Winners in each category will receive:
- First Prize: $1,000
- Runner-up: $200
NEW THIS YEAR: The Austin Clarke Prize is accompanied by an entry fee of $20. However, we understand that these fees can be prohibitive. If you are unable to pay the fee, we have limited fee-free submission options. Please only use this form if entering the contest is not possible otherwise. If the submission cap has been reached and you wish to submit in this category, please get in touch at [email protected].
The deadline to enter is 11:59 p.m. on September 15, 2026. For full submission guidelines, visit our Submittable!
2026 Judges
Fiction: Kai Thomas
Kai Thomas is an author and educator. His background and body of work span from land stewardship, carpentry, and small-scale farming to historical research and scholarship. His debut novel, In the Upper Country, was awarded the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust prize for fiction and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. The work has been featured in news outlets such as NPR, CBC, The New York Times, and the Globe and Mail.
Poetry: jaye simpson
jaye simpson (she/they) is an Oji-Cree Saulteaux Indigiqueer from the Sapotaweyak Cree Nation. simpson is a writer, advocate and activist sharing their knowledge and lived experiences in hope of creating utopia.
she is published in several magazines including Poetry Is Dead, This Magazine, PRISM international, SAD Magazine: Green, GUTS Magazine, SubTerrain, Grain and Room. They are in four anthologies: Hustling Verse (2019), Love After the End (2020), The Care We Dream Of (2021), and Queer Little Nightmares (2022). Their first poetry collection, it was never going to be okay (Nightwood Ed.) was shortlisted for the 2021 ReLit Award and a 2021 Dayne Ogilvie Prize Finalist while also winning the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Poetry in English. a body more tolerable, her second book of published poetry was recently shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Prize.
she is a displaced Indigenous person resisting, ruminating and residing on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-waututh), and sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) First Nations territories, colonially known as Vancouver.
