This annual competition recognizes emerging arts writers, critics, poets, creatives and students, providing them the opportunity to expand their practice. For the purposes of the award, an emerging writer is defined as anyone who has not published more than one piece of writing in a recognized print or online publication, exclusive of student-run journals and magazines, as well as self-published works. Writers can submit to one or both of the following categories: Arts Writing and the Aruna D’Souza Award for BIPOC writers.
2024 ARTS WRTING PRIZE WINNERS
The Gallery is excited to announce the winners of the 13th annual SAAG Arts Writing Prize for 2024.
ARUNA D’SOUZA (BIPOC) AWARD
Pari - “A Love Letter to my Canadian Punjabi Girl in Edmonton, from their Indian Bengali Boy from Kolkata in Vancouver”
PARI (they/his) is an Indian storyteller and chronicler based out of Vancouver, Canada. An emerging BIPOC artist, they explore the intersection of collective and intergenerational trauma within Asian diasporic households and how their osmosis may uphold cycles of delayed grief across generations.
RUNNER UP
Omar Farah - "He is Essentially an Africanist": The Decade Show's Abandonment of the Afrocentric for the Afrovertical”
Omar Jason Farah (b. 2000) is a Somali-Canadian curator, writer, and scholar based in New York, US. He is currently a master's candidate at CCS Bard and incoming Curatorial Intern at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He holds his A.B degree (summa cum laude) in Religion from Princeton University. During his time there, he curated several exhibitions focused on the work of Black student artists and worked under Chief Curator Stamatina Gregory at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. His research is sharply focused on developing historical methods that allow for the preservation but not overdetermination of blackness.
RUNNER UP
Mehrnoosh Alborzi - “The Semiotics of Spoons: Moridja Kitenge Banza’s De 1848 a Nos Jours”
Mehrnoosh (she/her) is an Iranian-Canadian healthcare provider, researcher, and a student of art history at Concordia University. She is also an emerging writer and an editor at the university’s student journal. Her interests include radical and protest art, insurgent spaces, and anything from the seventies.
ARTS WRITING PRIZE
Prabhnoor Kaur - “Nalini Malani, Crossing Boundaries at Musée des Beaux-Arts, Montreal - Exhibition Review”
Prabhnoor Kaur is a writer and art historian based in Tiohtià:ke / Montreal: My research interests include contemporary art, diaspora narratives, and reality tv. I am currently pursuing my Masters in Art History at McGill University, exploring how airplanes form a visual vocabulary to express a Punjabi desire for migration. When not writing, I am, of course, reading.
This year’s winners, as chosen by a jury made up of editor, writer, and curator Aruna D’Souza, @gallerieswest Magazine Editor Shelley Boettcher, and writer Henry HeavyShield, will receive a $1,000 prize and an arts mentorship opportunity. Runners up will receive a $250 prize. All entrants will receive a copy of the SAAG Arts Writing Prize Reader 2024. made in-house at the Gallery’s Tiny Press bookbinding studio. This prize is offered in partnership with Galleries West Magazine.
2024 ARTS WRITING PRIZE READER
You can read all the submissions, including those of the winners and runners-up, here in the 2024 Arts Writing Prize Reader. A print edition, published in the Gallery’s Tiny Press Studio will be available to all entrants and for the public through the Shop at SAAG.