The Montreal International Poetry Prize is now open for submissions! The deadline to submit is 15 May. Approximately sixty-five finalists will see their work published in The Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology 2026, and one winner will take home$20,000, one of the world’s largest prizes for a single original poem.

The Montreal Prize is a crowd-funded initiative that brings together poets from all around the globe. It offers a significant cash prize with the aim of helping the winning poet make more room for poetry in their lives. The early bird fee for a first entry is $25. After 1 May, the first entry is $28. Additional submissions are $20 at all times. Entrants may add a sponsored entry (donation) to their cart to anonymously cover the fee of a fellow poet from elsewhere in the world.

Welcoming entries from over a hundred countries, the Montreal Prize seeks to represent the diversity of global Englishes in their full breadth of dialects and textures. The jury comprises twelve established poets who select a shortlist, and a distinguished judge who picks the final winner from this list. In the past, Sir Andrew Motion, Eavan Boland, Yusuf Komunyakaa, Lorna Goodison, and A.E. Stallings have served as the final judge. We are delighted to announce that our celebrated 2026 judge is Natalie Diaz, whose many honours include a MacArthur Fellowship, Lannan Literary Foundation Fellowship, and Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship.

Our adjudication foregrounds the poem as an aesthetic experience, and neither the jury nor final judge know the names of the poets whose submissions they are reading. The jurors of the 2026 contest are Jaswinder Bolina, Kayla Czaga, Boris Dralyuk, Iona Lee, Brandy Nālani McDougall, Sin?ad Morrissey, Sachiko Murakami, Robin S Ngangom, Felicity Plunkett, Sheryda Warrener, Derek Webster, and Sithembele Isaac Xhegwana.

Beyond the cash prize, the value of the Montreal Prize lies in the community that it builds. Submitting a poem is an act of belief in the power of poetry. As poets themselves, our jurors appreciate the value of individual poems as unique forms of self-expression. What’s more, we invite our jurors to showcase their own poetry in the annual online reading series, Fluid Vessels, which runs from March to May. Once the winner is announced, longlisted poets may also be invited to read at Fluid Vessels.

Every one of our sixty-five finalists will get to see their poems printed in an anthology, which is published by V?hicule Press of Montreal. This is the lasting record of each biennial competition. It is available in bookstores and libraries, and even taught in classrooms.

We believe poetry is a meeting of minds in lyric space. Each person who is involved in running the Montreal Prize, from the student volunteers to the operations managers, is a passionate reader of poetry. We are proud of the fact that every committee meeting starts with a discussion of a poem by one of our judges, jurors, or finalists. Poetry before business, always.

In 2024, American poet kizziah burton was awarded the Montreal Prize for her poem “Portrait of Me Incensing the Mushrooms Channelling Demeter.” The text of this powerful poem can be found on our website, alongside a laudation by last cycle’s final judge, A.E. Stallings, and the entire shortlist of the 2024 competition.

The next winner and finalists of the Montreal Prize will be announced in September and October 2026.

For more information, visit www.montrealpoetryprize.com

Contact the Montreal Prize Committee at montrealpoetryprize@mcgill.ca

Director
Carmen Faye Mathes

Operations Managers
Molly Pearce
Martin Breul

Committee
Sarah Wolfson
Elena Senechal-Becker

Department of English
McGill University
853 Sherbrooke St. West
Montreal, QC  H3A 0G5