Liz Howard's Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, Tolu Oloruntoba's The Junta of Happenstance and David Bradford's Dream of No One But Myself comprise the Canadian shortlist for the $65,000 award.
There is a Ukrainian rock 'n' roll song called "We Will Not Die in Paris" by a band called Dead Rooster that became popular in 1991 as the Soviet Union was losing its grip on Ukraine. The context of the song was that a lot of Ukrainian poets and artists had fled to the West while their homeland was a Soviet client state, and that they intended one day to return.