Marla Lehberg, chair of the Writers’ Trust board of directors, and Anne-Marie Turza at the Storytellers Ball on Jan. 15, 2026. (George Pimentel Photograhy)

Victoria-based poet Anne-Marie Turza was named the recipient of the inaugural Writer’s Trust Board Fellowship at the nonprofit’s Storytellers Ball on Jan. 15.

The fellowship, which comes with $50,000 and a two-week residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, will reward one writer annually for “exceptional creative ability and outstanding promise in their publications to date.” The award is open to writers who has written two traditionally published books within the last five years.

“This is so unexpected. This award really came out of a void,” Turza said in accepting the award, before going on to explain to the audience the split lives she leads as a nurse and a poet. “Truthfully there’s little to virtually no overlap for me between these two worlds, even to the surname that I use. As a nurse I’m called on to be very practical, evidence-based, a licensed professional, a solver of problems, and a person who will dependably do the safest thing in whatever the given circumstance might be. I take this work very seriously. I also take poetry seriously, and I go to poetry when I want the opposite of nursing.”

Turza is the author of two poetry collections, The Quiet and Fugue with Bedbug, both published by House of Anansi Press, and the chapbook Slip Minute. She was a finalist for the 2011 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and the 2014 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. 

A jury comprised of writers Esi Edugyan, Charlotte Gray, and Wayne Johnston selected Turza as the recipient of the fellowship. For the award’s inaugural year, granted during the Writers’ Trust’s 50th anniversary year, the jury was tasked with selecting a recipient from candidates who had previously received an award, nomination, mentorship, or residency from the Writers’ Trust. The award will have a public-facing nomination process in future years.

In their citation, the jury called Turza “one of the most striking and idiosyncratic voices in Canadian poetry.”

“Her sensibility is unmistakable: oblique, funny, touched with an unforced strangeness that feels like a genuinely new way of seeing,” the jury wrote. “There is often a fairy tale quality to her imagery, a surreality; at other turns, she transforms the grit of everyday life into a glorious marvel. Turza is one of our finest poets, a visionary whose work has the texture of prophecy.”

The prize is funded by the Writers’ Trust board of directors, a 15-person group of volunteers. The award is designed to support writers as they approach their mid-career, and replaces the Writers’ Trust Fellowship, which ran from 2015 to 2019 and was aimed at celebrating a writer’s body of work and providing financial support for the development of their next project.

The program aims to recognize writers who have made a mark with their work and support them as they enter a point in their careers at which writers often have to step back from their work out of financial necessity.