The Quebecor Grand Prize for the Trois-Rivières International Poetry Festival is awarded to Pierre Ouellet for his book Dépositions published by Le Noroît

Trois-Rivières, le 5 septembre 2007 – This morning, at a press conference launching the programme for the 23rd International Poetry Festival, poet Pierre Ouellet was awarded a $15, 000 prize for his collection Dépositions published by Le Noroît. The award, a joint offering from Quebecor ($10 000) and the Trois-Rivières International Poetry Festival ($ 5 000), was presented by Sylvie Cordeau, Vice President of Communications at Quebecor Média. In addition to the prize, Ouellet has been invited to take part in all ten days of the festival, adding a $2 000 value to the purse.

The winning collection is an impressive work by a very lucid, intelligent, occasionally acerbic poet. It is a work that vibrates with intense music and sustained rhythm : what appears cerebral, at first glance, quickly blossoms into incantation, exorcism, a voice imbued with shaman-like qualities. It is thought, intensity, pushing to the extreme in order to convey reality in all its truth, with a nod along the way to the ruptures, the pain, the monstrosities. Jury members unanimously and enthusiatically agreed that it is unusual to find such a perfect marriage of the finite and the infinite in one volume: the body in all its broken thought and thought in all its materiality. Jean-Marc Desgent, who chaired the jury, said that it was this rare combination that convinced committee members to award the prestigious Quebecor Grand Prize for 2007 to Ouellet.

Of sixty books submitted to the jury, five were shortlisted for the prize : Martine Audet for her collection Manivelles (Éditions de l’Hexagone), François Charron for Ce qui nous abandonne (Éditions Les Herbes rouges), Gilles Cyr for Fruits et frontières (Éditions de l’Hexagone), François Hébert for Comment serrer la main de ce mort-là (Éditions de l’Hexagone), and Pierre Ouellet for Dépositions Éditions Le Noroît). The five books were identified as the most accomplished works this year in Quebecois poetry.

The jury consisted of Nathalie Watteyne, poet, essayist and professor of literature at the University of Sherbrooke ; Paul Chanel Malenfant, poet, essayist, and professeur at the University of Quebec at Rimouski ; and poet Jean-Marc Desgent, instructor of literature and anthropology at Collège Édouard-Montpetit. 

The prize was established in 1984 to pay homage to the literary accomplishments of Gatien Lapointe and to acknowledge his impact on the poetry scene.

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