A huge congratulations to Dionne Brand for winning Ontario’s Trillium Book Award! Her book The Blue Clerk (McClelland & Stewart) was named the best English-language title in the province.
In The Blue Clerk, award-winning poet Dionne Brand stages a conversation and an argument between the poet and the Blue Clerk, who is the keeper of the poet’s pages. In their dialogues—which take shape as a series of haunting prose poems—the poet and the clerk invoke a host of writers, philosophers, and artists, from Jacob Lawrence, Lola Keipja, and Walter Benjamin to John Coltrane, Josephine Turalba, and Jorge Luis Borges.
—from Penguin Random House Canada
The Blue Clerk was also a finalist for the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. As well, it was on the longlist for The League of Canadian Poets’ 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Brand’s poetry collection Land to Light On also won the Trillium Book Award in 1998.
We are proud to congratulate Brand on this honour, and we invite you to visit Canadian Literature’s articles on and book reviews of her work:
Articles
- “It is life you must write about”: Fixity and Refraction in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging
by Sharlee Cranston-Reimer
Published in Emerging Scholars 2. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 228-229 (Spring/Summer 2016): 93-109 - Spaces of Agency: Installation Art in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For
by Veronica Austen
Published in Agency & Affect. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 223 (Winter 2014): 67-83 - Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries: Songs of Necropolitics
by Anne Quéma
Published in Recursive Time. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 222 (Autumn 2014): 52-68 - Roughing It in Bermuda: Mary Prince, Susanna Strickland Moodie, Dionne Brand, and the Black Diaspora
by Andrea Medovarski
Published in Tracking CanLit. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 220 (Spring 2014): 94-114 - Soccer and the City: The Unwieldy National in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For
by Michael Buma
Published in Sport and the Athletic Body. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 202 (Autumn 2009): 12-27 - Affective Coordination and Avenging Grace: Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here
by John Corr
Published in Disappearance and Mobility. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 201 (Summer 2009): 113-129 - “Streets are the dwelling place of the collective”: Public Space and Cosmopolitan Citizenship in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For
by Emily Johansen
Published in Diasporic Women’s Writing. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 196 (Spring 2008): 48-62 - Wondering into Country: Dionne Brand’s A Map of the Door of No Return
by Maia Joseph
Published in Canada Reads. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 193 (Summer 2007): 75-92 - Picking the Deadlock of Legitimacy: Dionne Brand’s “noise like the world cracking”
by Ellen Quigley
Published in Women & the Politics of Memory. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 186 (Autumn 2005): 48-67 - Dionne Brand’s Winter Epigrams
by Edward Kamau Brathwaite
Published in Poets & Politics. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 105 (Summer 1985): 18-30
Book Reviews
- Theory reviewed in Love under Capitalism by Natalee Caple
- The Blue Clerk reviewed in Postnational Argonauts by Gregory Betts
- At the Full and Change of the Moon reviewed in Uses of Cultural Memory by Maureen Moynagh
- The Journey Prize Stories 19: The Best of Canada’s New Writers by Caroline Adderson, David Bezmozgis and Dionne Brand reviewed in New Short Fiction by Heidi Tiedemann Darroch
- What We All Long For reviewed in Soul Survivors by Evelyn C. White
- Inventory reviewed in Poems of Witness by Hilary Clark
- Land to Light on reviewed in Still Need the Revolution by Susan Gingell
- “We’re Rooted Here and They Can’t Pull Us Up”: Essays in African Canadian Women’s History by Dionne Brand et al. reviewed in Others’ Histories by Donna Palmateer Pennee
- Thirsty reviewed in Orbiting Toronto by Heather Smyth
- Bread out of Stone reviewed in Making Bread out of Stone by Guy Beauregard
- Chronicles: Early Works reviewed in Black Chronicles by Pilar Cuder-Domínguez
See also CanLit Guides chapters on Dionne Brand’s works
- Dionne Brand: No Language Is Neutral
by Carl Watts - Diaspora Studies and Canadian Literature
by L. Camille van der Marel - What We All Long For by Dionne Brand
(Case Study)