Poet Natalie Lim on what winning the CBC Poetry Prize has meant for her career
The CBC Poetry Prize is open between April 1 and June 1
Natalie Lim is a Chinese-Canadian poet based in Vancouver. Her work has been featured in Arc Poetry Magazine and Best Canadian Poetry 2020, among others. Lim won the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and Room magazine's 2020 Emerging Writer Award.
Her debut poetry collection Elegy for Opportunity was published in April 2025. Through candid reflections on the issues and events that shape today's society — from climate anxiety to the cultural impact of Taylor Swift, Elegy for Opportunity explores the tension and beauty of a world marked both by grief and pockets of joy.
The CBC Poetry Prize is an annual competition — and the 2025 prize is currently open for submissions until June 1 at 4:59 p.m. ET. The prize recognizes works of original unpublished poetry, up to 600 words in length.
The winner will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and their work will be published on CBC Books.
Lim spoke to CBC's Up to Speed host Faith Fundal about Elegy for Opportunity and why poets should enter the CBC Poetry Prize.
You released Elegy for Opportunity earlier this month. How do you make space for both of those things? A Lament for the dead and 'Opportunity.'
Well, that's kind of what the book is about. So the title of the collection Elegy for Opportunity, the Opportunity in that title refers to the NASA space rover who was sent to Mars to collect soil and rock samples and look for evidence of water on the planet.
And when she was declared 'dead' in 2019, there was this sort of collective mourning that occurred all over the world.
I would describe Elegy for Opportunity is a series of reflections on living and loving in a time of overlapping crises. You know, for people my age, I think we're looking around us and we see an affordability crisis and a slow march toward climate disaster — and what feels like a backslide of societal progress, injustice and suffering all around the world.
But at the same time, there's so many small joys to be grateful for in our everyday lives. Here we are watching our favourite movies and going camping with friends and falling in love. How do we hold those two realities together?
The book is my way of trying to work through that question using poetry.
The first poem in the collection is called Love Poems Don't Win Contests. What is it about and why did you place it first in the collection, the first one is always the one that people will see first.
That was a very deliberate choice. When I won the CBC Poetry Prize with Arrhythmia, it was about my Chinese Canadian heritage and identity and loss of language. And I'm so proud of that poem, but it was also my first ever published work. I worried after I wrote it that maybe that was the kind of poem people would want from me.
When I sat down to write for this collection, a lot of love poems came out of me and I struggled with whether I should put them in the book at all. I think that young writers, especially writers who identify as Black, Indigenous, people of colour, have certain expectations put on them from the literary establishment.
When I sat down to write for this collection, a lot of love poems came out of me and I struggled with whether I should put them in the book at all.- Natalie Lim
There's this idea that in order to be important or prize worthy, our poems have to be about identity and heritage and our deepest, darkest pain and trauma and suffering.
And we need those poems in the world, we absolutely do.
But I think we need to make space for love poems, too. So many of my poet colleagues are doing this work of making space for all kinds of poetry in the world.
I wrote Love Poems Don't Win Contests and put it at the front of the book to remind myself to write the book that I wanted to write — and not the book I thought people might want to read.
I also hope to participate in that space-making for writers all across Canada.
We have to talk about the CBC Literary Prizes because you won in 2018. Was it obvious to you what impact entering and winning the CBC Poetry Prize has had on your career as a whole or even in that moment back in 2018?
Not at all! I submitted to the CBC Poetry Prize kind of on a whim. I'll be honest, I was still in university, I didn't know anything about the publishing industry. I only knew that I wanted to write more poetry and I knew that the thing that would inspire me to write was a deadline.
So I found the prize and the deadline and figured I would submit. And here we are! If I had done five minutes of research and looked at a past winner, I think I might have been too intimidated to try it at all.
That taught me an important lesson, which is the advice that I give most often, especially to young writers — don't count yourself out in advance.
There are so many incredible opportunities out there and you just never know which one of them will open up an incredible door for you. The CBC Poetry Prize was that for me.
When you won the CBC Poetry Prize in 2018, how did that affect the way you saw the world and maybe the way the world saw you?
I love that question! It was my first published work ever when I won the CBC Poetry Prize. And so I don't know what I was expecting. I couldn't have imagined the doors and the world that it would open up for me. You know, the prize money, the chance to do the residency at the Banff Centre, bringing my work to that large audience — it was the first time that my work had been read widely.
The response I received to that poem was so overwhelming and so beautiful. People were reaching out to say that it resonated with them from across the country and I'm just so grateful for that experience.
What advice would you give to someone who's thinking about entering?
If you feel inspired, if you have something you want to share, submit to the contest and submit to any opportunity you can, because you never know who is on the other end of that submission just waiting to receive your words.
Natalie Lim's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
