The Malahat Review is pleased to announce the winners of this year’s P. K. Page and Jack Hodgins Founders’ Awards in poetry and short fiction respectively. Patrick Friesen, of Victoria, BC won the 2012 P. K. Page Founders’ Award for Poetry for his poem “storm windows,” which appeared in the Spring, 2011 issue (#174). Friesen’s poem was chosen by judge John Steffler. Daniel Karasik, of Toronto, Ontario won the 2012 Jack Hodgins Founders’ Award for Fiction for his story, “Witness,” which appeared in the Fall, 2011 issue (#176). Karasik’s story was chosen by judge Jeanette Lynes.

Of Patrick Friesen’s poem, judge John Steffler says, “Many other poems in these issues of The Malahat are technically exciting or show amazing passages of imaginative and linguistic brilliance; several poems display impressive craft, labour, and knowledge in the way they address a particular subject; several are marked by strong narrative personas and deeply engaging accounts of human experience; but Patrick Friesen's  ‘storm windows’ seems to me to go an extra step in conjuring up and offering an experience of poetry's ability to transform consciousness, alter perception, and enlarge our awareness of ourselves, our lives, and our world.  It is a masterfully crafted poem that goes on resonating with a sense of the power, the troubling beauty, and the mysterious significance in ordinary experience.”

Of Daniel Karasik’s story, judge Jeanette Lynes says, “Daniel Karasik’s ‘Witness’ explores, with haunting eloquence, various states of isolation, the basic human need for communication, and the value of art in the face of violence.  Driven by recursive rhythm and refrain – the narrator’s obsessive, incantatory worry that he ‘might never publish a novel’ – and front-loaded with flashbacks, Karasik steers us through the lonely spaces of suburbia to a weird, almost Kafka-esque world of incarceration, all focalized through the self-deprecating, compassionate voice and poetic (and yes, somewhat geeky in a good way) soul of his first-person narrator. So much of the time Karasik’s protagonist spends alone with no one to talk to – except a strange dog – yet despite its manic isolation the story remains three-dimensional. A story of longing in a world peopled with thugs. ‘Witness,’ with its poetic reverberations, will stick with me for a long time.”