Jordan Abel

Jordan Abel is an academic and poet who lives and works in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta.

Early life and education Abel was born Vancouver, British Columbia to a Nisga'a father and white mother. He grew up in Barrie, Ontario.

Career Abel's work addresses settler-colonialism directly, often through conceptual poetic approaches to overtly colonial texts (for example, Abel's books cut up, sample, and interrupt the Project Gutenberg archive of Western novels and Marius Barbeau's Totem Poles).

His first book of poetry, The Place of Scraps (Talonbooks), used as source text the work of 20th century ethnographer Marius Barbeau. It won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award in 2014. His second book, Un/inhabited, was named one of the best 75 books of 2015 by the CBC.

Abel's third book of poetry, Injun, won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. The poems were based on 91 Western novels written during the past three centuries.

Abel's memoir NISHGA was published in 2020, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

His novel Empty Spaces, published in 2023, was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction at the 2024 Governor General's Awards.

Work

Novels

Empty Spaces (Penguin Random House, 2023)

Poetry The Place of Scraps (Talonbooks, 2013) Un/inhabited (Talonbooks, 2015) Injun (Talonbooks, 2016) Dad Era (Coach House Books, 2026)

Memoir

NISHGA (Penguin Random House, 2020)