Otoniya J. Okot Bitek Wins Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize 2023

Otoniya J. Okot Bitek’s poetry collection A is for Acholi was declared the winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize on Monday, September 25, 2023.

The BC and Yukon Book Prizes, established in 1985, are aimed at recognising and promoting writers, illustrators, and publishers in British Columbia (BC) and Yukon in Canada. Award winners are selected through a juried system, with five finalists in each prize category, including the winner selected in each prize category. There are several categories in the award one of which is the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize awarded to the author of the best work of poetry.

The winner of the award for 2023 is Otoniya J. Okot Bitek for her poetry collection A is for Acholi published by Wolsak & Wynn. The collection is described in its blurb thus;

A Is for Acholi is a sweeping collection exploring diaspora, the marginalization of the Acholi people, the dusty streets of Nairobi and the cold grey of Vancouver. Playfully upending English and scholarly notation Otoniya J. Okot Bitek rearranges the alphabet, hides poems in footnotes and slips stories into superscripts. The poet opens up ways of rethinking history as she rewrites both the 1862 contact of the Acholi people with the British and the racist texts of Joseph Conrad, while also searching for a way to live on lands that are fraught with the legacies of colonization, similar to her ancestral homeland. With writing that is lyric, layered and deeply felt, the poems in A Is for Acholi unfold maps of history, culture and identity, tracing a route to a present where the poet dreams of writing a world without empire.

Responding to the win the tweet, “A is for Acholi is the winner of the Dorothy Livesay Prize for Poetry! Thank you, BC and Yukon Book Prizes!”