Alberta poet and writer Sid Marty has been named the winner of the first ever Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize.

The $10,000 prize, announced last month, honours Canadian poets and poetry, and celebrates the legacy of Purdy. The winner was announced on April 21, the 24th anniversary of the poet’s death.

Marty, who has been writing and publishing poems since 1970, has published five books of poetry and five books of nonfiction. He won the Purdy Prize for his 2023 collection, Oldman’s River: New and Collected Poems, published by NeWest Press in 2023. The collection had been shortlisted for the 2023 Banff Mountain Book Competition fiction and poetry prize.

“Sid Marty is a plain-spoken poet with a distinctive Canadian voice very much in the Purdy tradition. In fact, he was a good friend of Al’s and got his first big break when Al included him in the landmark anthology Storm Warning: The New Canadian Poets in 1971,” Eurithe Purdy said in a release. “Since that time, Sid has continued to make consistently high-quality contributions to Canadian writing, both in prose and poetry. Oldman’s River: New and Collected Poems is a major work bringing together the best of Sid’s poetry over more than fifty years, as well as impressive new writing. It is a very worthy recipient of the first Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize.”

Purdy worked with others to select a winner for this year’s prize from new poetry volumes published in the last two years. Future prizes will be awarded by a panel of judges.