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Shane Book is an award-winning poet and filmmaker. He was educated at the University of Victoria, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His writing has appeared in more than twenty anthologies, including The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry.

Congotronic 2015 Shortlist

House of Anansi, Canada

Judges’ Citation

Here is a contemporary world music that whirls the reader into the centre of the action at once.

Here is a contemporary world music that whirls the reader into the centre of the action at once. Here is a spread of thoughts with a winning beat, a door held open to varieties of sound and content from multiple cultures. In these beautifully adept pages, English as we know it is not the only language we are reading but a spread of voices receptive to webs and forms from everywhere else. It’s a new poetics but also wholly recognizable in its content. An outcry written to be heard while reading: this poetry signals a breakthrough necessary, innovative and emotionally piercing.