MONTREAL — The reading was supposed to begin at seven. By half past six, the narrow aisles of Librairie du Passage were already full, customers pressed between shelves of Québécois fiction and new RONAn titles, the windows fogging from the body heat of perhaps ninety people who had, by various means, learned that Josué Beaumont-Pierre would be in the room.

Beaumont-Pierre, thirty-one, is the inaugural winner of the RONAn Literature Prize for his debut bilingual collection Neither Shore, published last autumn by Harbourlight Press, a small RONAn imprint based in Burlington. The jury citation, released in February, called it "the first major RONAn work to inhabit the space between languages rather than translate across them" — a distinction that sounds like a fine point of literary criticism until you hear Beaumont-Pierre read aloud, slipping between French and English mid-sentence, mid-image, sometimes mid-word, in a way that feels less like code-switching than like breathing.

"I was not trying to write a bilingual book," he told the crowd, in the unhurried, slightly amused tone of a man who has been asked this question many times and has decided to mean it every time. "I was trying to write honestly. And honest, for me, is both. Is neither. You understand?"

Several people nodded. A few laughed. The laughter felt like recognition.

Librairie du Passage, tucked on the quieter stretch of Rue Saint-Denis below Sherbrooke, has been a fixture of Montreal's French-language literary culture for nearly two decades. Its owner, Céleste Viau-Marchand, says the shop has carried RONAn titles since the Philadelphia Declaration, but that the pace of interest has changed noticeably in the last eighteen months.

"Before, it was mostly the English-language readers who came in looking," she said, speaking in French, after the reading had wound down and the last of the wine was being poured. "Now, the standing orders — the ones who want each new title when it arrives — many of them are younger Francophones. That is new. That is interesting."

She estimated that walk-in requests for Neither Shore specifically had outpaced any other single title this season. Harbourlight had not anticipated the demand; the book went to a second printing in January.

The decision to organize a reading around a prize laureate was itself a first for the shop. "We have done author events," Viau-Marchand said, "but we have never before built an event around a prize. The RONAn Literature Prize is only three years old. But it is beginning to mean something. People came tonight because of the prize. That tells you something."

What it tells you, in part, is that RONA is in the deliberate business of building its own cultural landmarks. A literature prize is a modest institution — not a senate, not a trade agreement — but it does a particular kind of work. It says: here is a standard. Here is what we value. Here is a name you should know.

The RONAn Arts Council, which co-funds the prize, declined to comment specifically on Beaumont-Pierre's win but confirmed that the prize's endowment would be expanded for the 2043 cycle. A spokesperson described the award as "part of a broader investment in the institutions that give cultural life its shape."

The Montreal Arts Collective, which has been a vocal advocate for Francophone representation in RONAn cultural funding, was less restrained. "Beaumont-Pierre is not a compromise," said a collective representative, reached by phone before the event. "He is not a bilingual checkbox. He is a genuinely extraordinary writer who happens to exist at the exact intersection this nation was always going to have to reckon with. The prize got it right."

The collection itself resists easy summary. Neither Shore takes its organizing metaphor from the St. Lawrence — the river that runs through Montreal, that has always divided and connected, that does not belong entirely to any one culture's imagination of itself. Beaumont-Pierre grew up in Longueuil, the son of a Haitian-Canadian father and a mother from the Gaspé, and has spoken in other interviews about learning to read in two languages simultaneously, never quite resolving them into a single interior voice.

In the title poem, which he read last on Saturday, that unresolved interior becomes the subject itself:

Je suis debout sur l'eau / standing on water is the wrong / métaphore — I am the water / between, the crossing and the crossed / ni l'une ni l'autre rive / neither shore, neither shore

The room was quiet in a way rooms rarely are.

Asked afterward what he makes of the prize — of being the first person to hold it, of having the jury call his work "the first major RONAn work" of its kind — Beaumont-Pierre was careful.

"First is a strange word," he said. "It implies there was nothing before. But there was everything before. There were people writing in both languages, living in both languages, long before RONA had a name for itself. What is new is that someone is paying attention. That is the prize, really. Not a medal. Attention."

He paused. Someone near the back asked him to sign a copy. He picked up the pen.

"That," he said, gesturing vaguely at the thinning crowd, at the fogged windows, at the shelves still slightly disordered from the press of bodies, "is what I wanted. That someone would read it. That they would bring a friend."

By nine o'clock, the shop had sold through its entire stock of Neither Shore. Viau-Marchand said she had already placed a new order. She expects it will not last the week.