Books

How does winning the CBC Poetry Prize change your life? Past winner Alycia Pirmohamed shares her experience

Posted: May 24, 2023
Last Updated: October 19, 2023

When Alycia Pirmohamed entered the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize, she was a student at the beginning of her writing career.  When her submitted collection, Love Poem with Elk and Punctuation, Prairie Storm and Tasbih, was named the winner, it was the first of many impressive accomplishments.

In 2022, she published her first poetry full collection, Another Way To Split Water. The book contains the poems that won the CBC Poetry Prize and would go on to be shortlisted for the League of Canadian Poets' Raymond Souster Award.

Another Way To Split Water is a lyrical exploration of how ancestral memory transforms across generations, through stories told and retold. Her poems touch on womanhood, belonging, faith, intimacy and the natural world.

The CBC Poetry Prize is an annual competition  and the 2023 prize is currently open for submissions until May 31, 2023 at 11:59 p.m. ET. The prize recognizes works of original unpublished poetry, up to 600 words in length. The winner will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and have the opportunity to attend a two-week writing residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point, a cultural hub on Toronto Island.

• 2023 CBC Poetry Prize is now open to Canadian poets

Pirmohamed was born in Edmonton and now is based in Scotland. She spoke to Dave White on CBC Yukon's Airplay about Another Way To Split Water and why poets should enter the CBC Poetry Prize. 

Tell me about your book, Another Way To Split Water. It was released last year. Tell me a bit about the story of it.

It's a book of poetry and it's my first collection. I think it encompasses all of the things and ideas and motifs I was thinking about since I've started writing poetry. 

Some of those things are about my family history, my family's history of migration. My parents were born in East Africa, we have Indian heritage as well and I was born in Alberta. So it's meditating on all these different homes and places of belonging and what it means to live in a place and be from many places.

I understand that some of the poems that helped you win the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize are part of this collection. Is that right?

They are. All three of them are in the collection.

Was it obvious that they had to be part of your first book?

I think so. There's never been an iteration of this book that didn't have those poems in it, even though other poems have come and gone.

I think it's because those poems really do connect with the larger themes of the books. There's one called Love Poem with Elk and Punctuation and a lot of the poems in the book are about love. That one always just felt like one of the hearts of the collection.

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Do you remember what motivated the young Alycia to enter the CBC Poetry Prize back in the day?

There's a few things. Finding an audience was a big thing that motivated me to start submitting my poems to the CBC Poetry Prize, but just to other journals and magazines as well getting to share this work and finding a readership.

Also, the CBC Poetry Prize always publishes their longlist as well. And the longlist has so many amazing poets on it. I discovered so many new writers on the longlist. I felt like I really wanted to be a part of that community as well.

• How Alycia Pirmohamed wrote the poems that won the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize

There was never any hesitation about putting your stuff up for consideration?

I think there has always been a little bit of hesitation about putting some sort of semi-autobiographical poems into the world, because it could be kind of exposing and you can feel really vulnerable doing it.

There's always that kind of hesitation, but the outcome, and even just the act of submitting, has been really valuable. So it's balancing those things.

Well, speaking of the outcome, what kind of impact did winning the thing have on your writing career?

It had a really big impact, actually. First of all, I was receiving messages from people all over Canada, but even beyond. And they were telling me that they were connecting with poems that I'd written, that they had never seen words like tasbih be in poems before and felt really represented. I think that was really special.

But also gave me the confidence to keep going. Poetry is getting more and more popular in mainstream culture. But I think that can be kind of seen as a little niche sometimes. And so it gave me the confidence to reach for more things.

• Alycia Pirmohamed wins 2019 CBC Poetry Prize

It's pretty amazing when you put yourself out there like that and then reaction starts to come in from people who have no idea who you are, no idea what your story is necessarily, but your work resonates with them somehow.

I think that's been the best thing. I know that that made a difference to me when I was younger and starting to pick up books and think about my place in the world. So the fact that my work can do that for someone else is incredibly amazing and special.

We're a few weeks away before the deadline to enter the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize. From your perspective as a former winner of it, what do you think? What advice would you have for the people thinking about entering?

Consider showing your work to people. Like your friends and your family, or your teachers, your poetry mentors, if you happen to have that kind of community. 

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Show them your work before you submit it, so that you can see what's working and have the chance to share, to talk about what you're hoping that these poems do and see if they're successful in that way. Take that first step towards sharing those poems.

Alycia Pirmohamed's comments have been edited for length and clarity.