Winner of the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for Translation
Winner of the 2021 Nelson Ball Poetry Prize

In this stunning long poem, Chantal Neveu draws from the lexicons of science, art, revolution and corporeal movement to forge intense and extended rhythms that invoke the elements and spaces making up our world. This is poetry capable of holding life and death, solidarity and love. Renewal. Breathing.

In its brevity and persistence, This Radiant Life is a material call for action: it asks us to let go, even just a little bit, of our individuality in favour of mutuality, to arrive separately yet in unison at a radiance in which all living beings can thrive.

Chantal Neveu is a writer and an interdisciplinary artist. She is the author of the books Une Spectaculaire influence (2010), Coït (2010; translated into English by Angela Carr and published by BookThug in 2012), and mentale (2008). Her interdisciplinary textual projects include Èdres followed by Èdres | Dehors (2005) and Je suis venue faire l'amour, among others. A Spectacular Influence, translated by Nathanaël, is Neveu's second book to be published by BookThug. She lives in Montreal.

The (self-)translating author of more than twenty books, Nathanaël writes in English and in French. Her recent works include Sotto l'immagine (2014), Sisyphus, Outdone. Theatres of the Catastrophal (2012) and Asclepias: The Milkweeds (2015). Nathanaël's extrinsic translations include works by Danielle Collobert, Édouard Glissant, Hervé Guibert, Catherine Mavrikakis, and Hilda Hilst (the latter in collaboration with Rachel Gontijo Araújo). Nathanaël lives in Chicago.

Chantal Neveu's profile page

A central figure in contemporary poetry and one of the most iconoclastic figures in Galician and European literature, Chus Pato's sixth book, m-Tala, broke the poetic mould in 2000. Hordes of Writing, the third text in her projected pentology Method, received the 2008 Spanish Critics' Prize for Galician Poetry, and the Losada Di?guez literary prize in 2009. Pato continues to refashion the way we think of the possibilities of poetic text, of words, bodies, political and literary space, and of the construction of ourselves as individual, community, nation, world. She brings us face to face with the traumas and migrations of Europe, with writing itself, and the possibility (or not) of poetry accounting for our animal selves. Secession is Pato's ninth book and her fourth to be translated into English.

Montreal poet Erín Moure has published seventeen books of poetry in English and Galician/English, and thirteen volumes of poetry translated from French, Spanish, Galician and Portuguese into English, by poets such as Andr's Ajens, Nicole Brossard, Rosala de Castro, Louise Dupr?, and Fernando Pessoa. Her work has received the Governor General's Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the A.M. Klein Prize, and has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Prize. Moure is currently revising the bilingual French/English impossible play Kapusta, a sequel to The Unmemntioable, for publication in 2015, and is translating Chus Pato's Carne de Leviatan into English as Flesh of Leviathan, to appear in 2016. She is also working on a new book of poems called The Elements, and on a translation of Wilson Bueno's Mar Paraguayo.

Erín Moure's profile page

• Winner, Nelson Ball Prize
• Winner, Governor General's Lilterary Award for Translation

“In a book which is as much about physics as it is about the pressing conflicts of our current age, This Radiant Life seeks to find the light that emerges not just from the collisions of particles but also the actions and interactions of people.” —ZZYZYVA

“Moure has crafted a spectacular English poem in conversation with the French—a work channelling science, art, revolution and corporeal movement balanced in stillness and space. It is a thrilling space where meanings are amplified, beauty reverberates and the reader’s expectations are exceeded again and again. Moure advances new possibilities for both Neveu’s poem and translation itself.” —Governor General's Literary Award for Translation Jury Citation