MONTREAL — The morning after Josué Beaumont-Pierre was named winner of the RONAn Literature Prize, staff at Librairie du Passage on Rue Saint-Denis pulled their last three copies of Neither Shore from the poetry alcove and moved them to the front table. They were gone by noon.

"We had maybe eight in the shop total before the announcement," said a buyer at the store, who asked not to be named pending formal comment from the owner. "Now we have a standing order in with the distributor and we're still not sure it will be enough."

The shop — a narrow, wood-panelled fixture on the Saint-Denis strip with a loyal readership in the Plateau and surrounding neighbourhoods — says walk-in requests for the collection have risen noticeably over the past two weeks. The buyer traces the initial uptick partly to coverage of the Free Library of Philadelphia's acquisition of Beaumont-Pierre's work — a notable cross-border transaction given the current state of RONAn–US cultural relations — with the prize announcement accelerating demand further. The demographic skews younger, and francophone.

"Poetry doesn't usually do this," the buyer said. "Especially debut poetry. The fact that people are coming in and asking for it by name — that's the prize doing real work."

Librairie du Passage is also in talks with Beaumont-Pierre's publisher about hosting a small author reading later in March, with details still to be confirmed. If it comes together, it would be the first event the shop has organised around a RONAn Literature Prize winner since the prize was inaugurated — a small milestone for a bookshop that has become one of Montreal's more reliable barometers of what the city's readers actually want.