Eleonore Schönmaier is the internationally translated award winning Canadian author of poetry, music-theater, song lyrics, essays and fiction.
Her work can “be enjoyed for the beauty of the language alone” (Arc Poetry).
Manifesting “experiential empathy” (League of Canadian Poets), her poems “are acts of deep poetic cognition” (Antigonish Review). Her writing often “takes an ecological approach with its rich selection of nature poetry” (Canadian Literature) and the “natural world is prominent, almost dreamlike” (Prairie Fire). “[O]ne also hears a constant music in the poetry” (Canadian Poetries). “The effect is like that of a symphony with interwoven and subtly varied musical statements, and, as in a symphony, the effect is cumulative” (Arc Poetry). In their “clear-eyed perceptiveness” (Atlantic Books Today) her poems are “wonderfully unforgettable” (Fiddlehead).
Eleonore Schönmaier is the author of the critically acclaimed collections Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete (2021), Dust Blown Side of the Journey (2017), Wavelengths of Your Song (2013) and Treading Fast Rivers all from McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Treading Fast Rivers was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book by a Canadian. Dust Blown Side of the Journey was a finalist for the Eyelands Book Awards (Greece). Wavelengths of Your Song was published in German translation in 2020 as Wellenlängen deines Liedes from parasitenpresse (Cologne). Field Guide [to the Lost Flower] was presented as music-theater at the Athens Epidaurus Festival, 2025.
Rush of Wingspan is forthcoming in March 2026 (MQUP).
Schönmaier’s poems have been set to music by Greek, Dutch, Scottish, American and Canadian composers including Dorothy Chang, Carmen Braden, Panos Gklistis, Emily Doolittle, and Michalis Paraskakis. The New European Ensemble, Sound of Dragon Ensemble, Bosklank Trio, and the St Andrews New Music Ensemble have performed her poetry in concert.
She has been honoured with the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, the National Broadsheet Prize, the Sheldon Currie Fiction Prize (second place), the Dave Williamson National Short Story Prize (honourable mention), the Earle Birney Prize, and the CBC Poetry Prize (finalist), among others.
Her poetry was chosen for the Academy of American Poets Poem in Your Pocket Day booklets in 2018, and 2021 and for the League of Canadian Poets Poem in Your Pocket Day brochures in 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2023.
Her writing has been published extensively in literary magazines in Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Bangladesh, Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Her work is widely anthologised in the United States and Canada including in Best Canadian Poetry.
Layered with a deeply felt compassion, her writing has a strong musical pulse and is alive with visual imagery. Her work is deeply rooted in life-long experiential environmentalism.
Born and raised in a northern Canadian wilderness settlement, she has also lived on the shores of Lake Ontario, the North Sea, and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.