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Meet the 2023 Elizabeth Venart Prize recipient

Roberta McGinn says winning the 2023 Elizabeth Venart Prize is the “pinnacle of delight.”

The Elizabeth Venart Prize was created in recognition of the unique barriers to literary creation faced by women and other marginalized genders. Through the prize, the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) seeks to provide emerging writers with a unique opportunity for focused advancement of their writing projects and careers.

The prize comes with a $1,000 cheque, consultations with a mentor for the purposes of advice and feedback, and free enrollment in one of WFNS’s creative writing workshops.

“I’m grateful and utterly astonished,” says Roberta, 70, who is retired as a disability manager for the Workers’ Compensation Board. She lives in Dartmouth with her husband, dog, and two cats. “Now I don’t have to worry so much about having to go through December without a pay cheque.”

Since 2017, when she joined WFNS, Roberta has taken several writing workshops, so many that “I feel I’ve done a degree in creative writing.” She tries to write every day, and has been working on a fiction manuscript for several years.

With the supports received through the Venart Prize, she is hoping to concentrate on finishing her manuscript and, “oh, maybe getting it published.”

Created in 2021, the endowment for the Elizabeth Venart Prize was established through the generous support of the Venart family and individual donors. It is named in memory of Elizabeth Venart, a writer and mother. When she died in 2008, much of her writing remained unfinished.

WFNS continues fundraising efforts for the endowment—most successfully through the sale of Promptly: a miscellany of writing tips & tales from Nova Scotian authors. Beautifully designed and printed by Gaspereau Press, Promptly is available through the WFNS Gift Shop.

Speech language pathologist Trina Warner, a nonfiction writer, was the inaugural winner of the Elizabeth Venart Prize.

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Experience Levels

The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) uses the following terms to describe writers’ experience levels:

  • New writers: those with less than two years’ creative writing experience and/or no short-form publications (e.g., short stories, personal essays, or poems in literary magazines, journals, anthologies, or chapbooks).
  • Emerging writers: those with more than two years’ creative writing experience and/or numerous short-form publications.
  • Early-career authors: those with 1 or 2 book-length publications or the equivalent in book-length and short-form publications.
  • Established authors: those with 3 or 4 book-length publications.
  • Professional authors: those with 5 or more book-length publications.

Please keep in mind that each form of creative writing (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, writing for children and young adults, and others) provides you with a unique set of experiences and skills, so you might consider yourself an ‘established author’ in one form but a ‘new writer’ in another.

The “Recommended experience level” section of each workshop description refers to the above definitions. A workshop’s participants should usually have similar levels of creative writing and / or publication experience. This ensures that each participant gets value from the workshop⁠ and is presented with information, strategies, and skills that suit their career stage. 

For “intensive” and “masterclass” workshops, which provide more opportunities for peer-to-peer feedback, the recommended experience level should be followed closely.

For all other workshops, the recommended experience level is just that—a recommendation—and we encourage potential participants to follow their own judgment when registering.

If you’re uncertain of your experience level with regard to any particular workshop, please feel free to contact us at communications@writers.ns.ca