Mia Anderson of Québec has won the 2013 Montreal International Poetry prize of $20,000 for her poem “The Antenna.” Final judge Don Paterson selected “The Antenna” from a final group of fifty-two poems, included in the Montreal Prize 2013 Global Poetry Anthology, from twelve countries chosen from just under 2,000 entries from seventy countries. Paterson said of the winning poem, “‘The Antenna’ is that rare thing – a conceit which has the good taste not to outstay its welcome, but which also makes us think again about its subject in an entirely new way.”

Anderson, as well as being a gardener, Anglican priest, shepherd, actress, and a voice in CBC radio dramas, has published four books of poetry: Appetite, Château Puits ’81, Practising Death, and most recently The Sunrise Liturgy. She said, of winning the prize, “What I’m proud of, actually, is Montreal, and Québec my adoptive home, for having created this prize. As to winning it, that was a total unhoped-for-unthought-of… it’s uncanny, the pleasure it gives that the judge seems to have ‘got’ what I was trying to toss aloft. I’m immensely grateful.”

Read Anderson’s winning poem, “The Antenna,” here: http://montrealprize.com/2013-winner/