MONTREAL —

There is a phrase in Josué Beaumont-Pierre's debut collection, tucked into a poem titled Rivière sans nom, that the RONAn Literature Prize jury evidently could not get out of their heads: je suis la rive que tu n'atteins jamais / I am the shore you never reach. The line does not translate so much as it doubles — each version a distinct thing, neither subordinate to the other, both necessary. It is, in miniature, the achievement the jury has chosen to honor.

Beaumont-Pierre, 34, was awarded the RONAn Literature Prize on Saturday evening at a ceremony held at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec on Rue Berri, becoming the youngest poet to receive the honor since the prize's founding in 2038. His collection, Neither Shore, published last spring by Harbourlight Press, spans 74 poems composed simultaneously in English and French — not translated, the author has been at pains to insist, but thought in both at once.

The jury's citation read, in part: "Neither Shore is the first major RONAn work to inhabit the space between languages rather than translate across them. Beaumont-Pierre does not ask us to choose a side of the river. He makes the river itself the home."

Jury chair Adaeze Okonkwo-Villeneuve, a literary scholar at Concordia University, said the decision had been close but ultimately unambiguous. "We read a great deal of work this cycle that was formally ambitious, or politically urgent, or linguistically inventive," she told the Ronan Times on Sunday morning. "Josué's collection was all three at once, and it was also — and this matters — genuinely beautiful. The jury felt that it named something about this nation that we hadn't had words for yet. Which is, of course, rather the point."

Beaumont-Pierre grew up in the Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie neighbourhood of Montreal, the child of a Haitian-Québécois father and a New Hampshire-born mother who relocated to Montreal in 2033, two years before the secession referendum. He studied literature at the Université de Montréal and later at the University of Massachusetts Amherst — a border crossing of a different kind, as he has described it — before returning to Montreal in 2038, the year after Quebec formally joined RONA.

"I came back to a city that was the same city and a completely different country," he said in a brief address at Saturday's ceremony, his remarks moving between English and French with the same ease his poems do. "And I thought: the only honest thing I can do is write from exactly that confusion. Not resolve it. Live in it."

Neither Shore has already established itself as a fixture of the emerging RONAn literary canon. The Free Library of Philadelphia acquired three copies for its special collections last autumn — a symbolically weighted institution in a city that lent its name to the declaration that founded this republic. Orders through independent booksellers in Montreal have run ahead of supply since February, according to a representative of Harbourlight Press, who confirmed Saturday that a second printing of 5,000 copies is now underway.

Harbourlight Press editor Mireille Tanguay, who acquired the collection after reading a single manuscript poem in a small literary journal, said the response had exceeded every projection. "We are a small press and we published a debut poetry collection," she said, allowing herself a smile. "Poetry does not usually do this. Josué's work does this because it speaks to something people are actively trying to understand about themselves right now."

What people are trying to understand, in large part, is what it means to be RONAn at all. The republic turns six this year — old enough, perhaps, to have accumulated some instincts, but still young enough that its cultural identity remains genuinely contested and genuinely open. The RONAn Literature Prize, administered by the Ronan Arts Council, was created precisely to recognize and accelerate that process of formation. Its previous two recipients — a novelist from New Jersey and an essayist from the former New Brunswick — were each praised for work that grappled with rupture and reinvention. Beaumont-Pierre's win extends and complicates that lineage by insisting that the rupture was never clean to begin with.

A spokesperson for the Ronan Arts Council said the jury's framing of Beaumont-Pierre's work as operating "between languages" rather than "across" them represented "exactly the kind of cultural thinking that the prize exists to amplify." The spokesperson noted that the Arts Council is in the early stages of developing a multi-year literary translation initiative — a program that, in light of Saturday's award, may need to grapple with the question of what translation means when the source and the target are the same mind.

The Montreal Arts Collective, which advocates for Francophone cultural producers across the republic, offered a measured but warm response. "We have been patient about waiting for the full weight of Québécois and French-Canadian literary tradition to be recognized within RONAn institutions," said the Collective's director, speaking by telephone from her office in the Plateau. "This is not that, entirely — Josué's work is something new, something genuinely bilateral. But it is a significant signal that Montreal's particular experience of this nation is not peripheral. It is central."

Not everyone in the literary community has been unreserved in their enthusiasm. A small number of poets writing exclusively in French have questioned whether a bilingual collection — one that, by the author's own account, was composed with an Anglophone readership partly in mind — can fully represent the experience of Francophone RONAns who feel their language remains undervalued in the republic's institutional life. Beaumont-Pierre addressed this concern indirectly in his remarks Saturday, saying: "I am not writing for any one community. I am writing from the place where communities cannot be separated. If that is a betrayal of something, I accept the charge. I think it is more likely a description of where most of us actually live."

The prize carries a cash award of 40,000 RONAn dollars and a commission for a new work to be presented at the republic's next national cultural festival, scheduled for Philadelphia in 2043.

Beaumont-Pierre said Sunday that he had not yet decided what that commission would look like. "I'm going to sit with it," he said. "The best thing I can do right now is not rush toward an answer." He paused. "That is, I think, also what the book is about."

Neither Shore is available through Harbourlight Press and independent booksellers across the republic. A reading series is being planned for Montreal, Philadelphia, and Burlington later this spring.