Hello, readers. Announcement of the litpop awards:
The POP Montreal International Music
Festival and Matrix Magazine have joined forces to bring you Canada's most
innovative and exciting literary competition. We are looking for writing that
makes ears ring and throats hoarse. If you have what it takes, you will get your work published in Matrix,
and get free travel to POP Montreal for a night in your honour.
The winners, one from each category, will receive a round-trip ticket to POP
Montreal from September 19-23, 2012, a VIP pass to the Pop Montreal Festival,
free accommodation at a bed and breakfast, fall publication in Matrix Magazine
with full honorarium, and presentation at a special Matrix Litpop event during
the festival.
Submit by July 1, 2012. Winners will be notified in August.
Poets are asked to send no more than 5 poems; fiction and non-fiction writers
should send stories of no more than 3000 words. Full contest rules and
regulations can be found at popmontreal.com and matrixmagazine.org/litpop.
The POETRY judge is Ken Babstock, the
author of Methodist Hatchet (Anansi 2011) and Airstream
Land Yacht (Anansi, 2006) winner of The Trillium Prize for Poetry,
finalist for the Governor General's Award, The Griffin Prize for Poetry, and
The Winterset Award. Earlier collections include Mean, winner of
The Atlantic Poetry Prize and The Milton Acorn Award, and Days into
Flatspin, winner of a K.M. Hunter Award and finalist for the Winterset
Prize. All three books were listed in The Globe and Mail's Books of
the Year. His poems have won Gold at the National Magazine Awards, appeared
widely in anthologies in Canada, The US, and Ireland, and have been translated
into French, German, Dutch, Serbo-Croatian and Czech.
The FICTION judge is Melanie Little. Her debut book, the story
collection Confidence, was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award
and named one of the Globe and Mail's Top 100 books of 2003.
Her writing has appeared in the anthologies Scribner's Best of the
Fiction Workshops, Outskirts: Women Writing from Small Places, Certain
Things About My Mother, and Nerves Out Loud, as well as in
magazines including The Malahat Review, sub-TERRAIN, Prairie
Fire, Event, The Fiddlehead, and Books in
Canada. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Globe and Mail, Ottawa
Citizen, Georgia Straight, Vancouver Sun, and National
Post. She is a past winner of the Writers' Union of Canada Short Prose
Competition and the Periodical Writers' Association of Canada Journalism Award.
Little holds a Masters of Arts in English Literature from the University of
Toronto and is a graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at the
University of British Columbia, where she served as an editor of PRISM
International. She is now the Senior Editor with Anansi Press.
It is Goa in the monsoons. A shy and
lonely teenager finds himself drawn towards a group of holidaymakers. In their
midst is Momo, the woman he would do anything to be close to. As if sensing his
willingness, the group spends the day ‘testing’ him before pronouncing him
worthy of their friendship and their disclosures about themselves. 
