News

Malahat wins gold

June 12, 2006

The Malahat Review has won Gold in the Poetry Category of the 29th-annual National Magazine Awards, which were announced on Friday, June 9, in Toronto.

Malahat won Gold in Poetry for “Blue Dahlias,” a 40-part poem by Margo Button, of Victoria, which first appeared in the magazine’s Summer 2005 issue. Button receives a cash prize of $1500 from the National Magazine Awards Foundation and joins an elite company. This is the eighth time that Malahat has won Gold in this category since 1978. Past Malahat poetry winners include P. K. Page, Jan Zwicky, Anne Michaels, Don McKay, and Sean Virgo.

Harold Rhenisch, of 100 Mile Ranch, B.C., also received Honourable Mention this year in the Poetry Category, for “Abandon,” a poem also appearing in the Summer 2005 issue. Both Button’s and Rhenisch’s poems were co-winners in Malahat’s prestigious Long Poem Prize.

In the Fiction Category of the 29th-annual National Magazine Awards, Malahat received Honourable Mention for “The Night Window,” a short story by Bill Gaston, a professor in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria.

Margo Button is a Victoria-based poet whose first book, The Unhinging of Wings, won the 1996 Dorothy Livesay Award. Her other books include The Shadows Fall Behind and The Elders’ Palace. An expanded version of “Blue Dahlias” has just been published as a limited-edition chapbook by Leaf Press.

The Malahat Review congratulates Margo Button on her win as well as Harold Rhenisch and Bill Gaston on their honorable mentions in this year’s National Magazine Awards.