The Archibald Lampman Award recognizes an outstanding book of English-language poetry by an author living in the National Capital Region.
The jury for the 2025 award were Simina Banu (Quebec), Jake Byrne (Ontario), and Jess Housty (British Columbia).
2025 Winner
Heliotropia by Manahil Bandukwala
With form and language that surprises and delights, Manahil Bandukwala has crafted a perfect set of love poems for our current moment. Heliotropia is a study of love over seasons and across time, distance, and space, serving up love letters to lovers, friendship, and to the idea of love poetry itself. Aching in every syllable, Bandukwala’s work is a masterclass in restraint that somehow contains the entire galaxy in its shimmering petals. Heliotropia maps the curiosity and joy of human experience across creased bedsheets, good earth and the language of flowers. It invites readers across the threshold with arms spread wide in welcome; responding with an equally open heart is the only possible answer to this collection. [2025 Judges]
Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist from Karachi, Pakistan, now based in Mississauga and Ottawa, ON. She is the author of Heliotropia (Brick Books, 2024; shortlisted for the 2025 Pat Lowther Award and Raymond Souster Award) and MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022; shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Award). She has been twice-longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, in 2019 and 2024, and was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. She is the co-creator of Reth aur Reghistan, a multidisciplinary project exploring folklore from Pakistan through poetry, sculpture, and community arts. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.
2025 Shortlist
Gay Girl Prayers by Emily Austin
Emily Austin’s collection Gay Girl Prayers is both funny and important, riffing on Bible verses to create a new queer classic. A beautiful, moving declaration of pride supported by a surprisingly deep interrogation and investigation of Scripture, Austin reproduces the lyrical logic of the Bible to proclaim and reclaim queer resistance and joy against the rise of a hostile Christofascist culture. Expertly focused, and a book that judiciously says only what it needs to, this collection is both succour and supplication; it borrows holiness from every quarter and offers up to readers a feast of queer joy and liberation. It is irrepressible, irreverent, and impossible to separate from the tender affirmations and full-hearted witnessing of deeply connected queer relationships.
Emily Austin (she/her) is the author of Gay Girl Prayers (Brick Books, 2024) and the bestselling author of four novels, including We Could Be Rats (2025), and the forthcoming Is This a Cry for Help? (2026). Her debut, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, was longlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award. Her second novel, Interesting Facts About Space (2023), was also longlisted for the Leacock Medal, and was the #1 bestselling LGBTQIA+ book in Canada and the most circulated LGBTQIA+ book in Canadian libraries in 2024. Her work often centres lesbian characters and explores themes of mental health, religion, and neurodivergence. Originally from St. Thomas, ON, she has lived in Ottawa, in the territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation, for the past thirteen years.
Crazy/Mad by AJ Dolman
In Crazy/Mad, AJ Dolman masterfully crafts a collection that will deeply resonate with anyone who has navigated the mental healthcare system. A cerebral yet plain-spoken collection, playful in its forms, righteous in its rage and melancholy, Crazy/Mad obsessively-compulsively navigates questions of privilege, voice, and perspective, sewn through with line breaks as smooth as lorazepam. This collection holds the shapeshifting nature of resilience and resistance in its hands, weaving poems into stories, field notes and anthems of identity and dis(order). It is an authentic, bracing, and intimate collection in which the idea of diagnosis is tied up as much with fear as with liberation, inviting the reader into a shared experience of rage, elegance and instinct for survival.
AJ Dolman’s (they/she) debut poetry collection is Crazy / Mad (Gordon Hill Press, 2024). They previously authored Lost Enough: A collection of short stories (MRP, 2017) and three poetry chapbooks, and co-edited Motherhood in Precarious Times (Demeter Press, 2018). Dolman’s poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. A bi/pan+ rights advocate and founder of Bi+ Canada, they live on unceded, unsurrendered Anishinaabe Algonquin territory.
Other 2025 Nominees
| Book | Poet | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| all things small | Susan J. Atkinson | Silver Bow Publishing |
| Hard Electric | Michael Blouin | Anvil Press |
| Without Beginning or End | Jacqueline Bourque | MQUP |
| Light-carved Passages | Frances Boyle | Doubleback Books |
| Airplane Earth | Mary Lee Bragg | Silver Bow Publishing |
| The Living Law | Jesse Keith Butler | darkly bright press |
| Blood Belies | Ellen Chang-Richardson | Wolsak & Wynn |
| Hope and Love and Other Dreams | Mike Martin | Mezzo Publications |
| Toxemia | Christine McNair | Book*hug |
| Scar Atlas | Colin Morton | Aeolus House |
| Slow Walk Home | Suzanne Nussey | Saint Julian Press |
| Sweet Vinegars: Wildflower poems | Claudia Coutu Radmore | Shoreline Press |
| The Last to the Party | Chuqiao Yang | icehouse poetry |
Arc Poetry is grateful for the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Ottawa, as well as many individual supporters. For further information contact us at managingeditor@arcpoetry.ca.