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 2026 award were Gary Barwin (Hamilton), Ayomide Bayowa (Raleigh, NC), and Barbara Tran (Toronto).
2026 Shortlist
The Great Wake by Nina Berkhout
It is a testament to Nina Berkhout’s craft that she works so adeptly with small, quiet moments. The line is accountable for bridging Berkhout’s intentions and the reader’s assumptions to produce understanding and expose the distance between two different experiences of the world. In The Great Wake Berkhout writes exquisite poems of attention to the vital and intimate experiences of life—both personal and in the larger world—with beauty, insight, and graceful mastery of her craft.
Nina Berkhout’s poems have been featured in publications across Canada, including the Best Canadian Poetry anthology. The Great Wake is her sixth poetry collection. She has also written four novels, most recently This Bright Dust, which received the Ottawa Book Award.
Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery by Vera Hadzic
Vera Hadzic’s Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery is astutely observed and finely stitched. Her wondrous poems, rich in colour and cartilage, yield further pleasures with each reading. Transparently opaque in invitational deterrence, as you follow, unsure how to pass through or to tear it down, you are also asked to be humanely still while ingressing and egressing each poem. Hadzic’s poems are fascinating, vivid and surprising, alive to the strange beauty and marvellous darkness of the world.
Vera Hadzic is a writer based on the unceded territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation in Ottawa, Ontario. Her first full-length book of poems, Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery, was published by Anvil Press in 2025. Her poetry chapbook, Fossils You Can Swallow, was published by Proper Tales Press in 2023. She is pursuing her PhD in English literature at the University of Toronto. Her poetry and prose have appeared online and in print, and she is a poetry editor for long con magazine.
the book of sentences by rob mclennan
rob mclennan’s the book of sentences is an expansive tribute to the quotidian. Upset, in equilibrium, of capitulating or dismissing grievous sayings: da-DUM-less lines, somehow running-off like a syntactical tensioner and taking you places the line breaks can’t stop. mclennan has been building a distinctive poetic world for decades and this book feels like an arrival where all the elements work together to yield a powerful and inimitable vision expressed with confidence and craft.
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.
Join the Nina Berkhout, Vera Hadzic, and rob mclennan for a reading from their 2026 Lampman Award shortlisted books on Thursday, September 17, at Perfect Books, 258A Elgin Street, Ottawa. Doors open at 6:30pm and readings start at 7pm. More details here.
Other 2026 Nominees
| Book | Poet | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| Refugee Mouth | Sanita Fejzić | Frontenac House |
| Screaming Obscenities at the Sky | Christian McPherson | At Bay Press |
| Seed Beetle | Mahaila Smith | Stelliform Press |
| Birth, Death, and Survival | Melanie Whyte | Donahue Publishing |
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.