Preeminent Yiddish literature prize is open for submissions

Recent winners include Michoel Felsenbaum and Boris Sandler

Photo by Zoltan Bencze / Pexels

By Forverts Staff April 12, 2024

Montreal’s Jewish Public Library has announced that the Jacob Isaac Segal Awards for 2024 are now open for submissions. Its Yiddish literature award is among the most prestigious of its kind in North America, and one of the last awards of this kind today.

The two prizes it will award this year are:

5,000 Canadian dollars for Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme, for books on Jewish subjects written in French or English by authors who live in Quebec (though there is an exemption for non-residents whose book features Quebec prominently).
1,000 Canadian dollars for the Dr. Hirsh and Dvora Rosenfeld Award for Yiddish Literature, given for books written in Yiddish. Those applying for the Rosenfeld Award do not need to be residents of Canada.

All books must be published between January 1, 2022, and December 31, 2023, and be submitted before May 15, 2024 in pdf format by either the publisher or the author.

The Segal Awards have been given out for more than a century, though not on an annual basis.

Recent winners of the Rosenfeld Award are Michoel Felsenbaum in 2022 for A mesoyre vegn a freylekher libe-shmibe (Critical Notes on Love: Yiddish Poems on Love and Life), a collection of sensual love poems in Yiddish, and Boris Sandler in 2020 for Antiklekh funem sakvoyazh (Antiques from my Travel Bag).

You can watch the 2022 Rosenfeld Award ceremony here.

To learn more or to submit a work, click here.

Rukhl Schaechter and Zach Golden are the staff of the Forverts, the Yiddish Forward.

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