Yellowknife (Feb 10/06) - Author and poet Bren Kolson received a prestigious national honour last month.

The Yellowknife-born Metis writer was among 30 entrants shortlisted for the 2005 CBC Literary Awards. More than 1,000 writers across Canada entered.

"I was kind of testing the market to see where I would place nationally," Kolson said. "Just making the shortlist makes me feel I am as good a writer as the top 30 writers in Canada who sent material into the contest."

The organizers wrote Kolson a letter urging her to contribute more work next year.

The fiction that earned praise from the CBC is a nine-page short story entitled The Crazy Cats Shadow Night.

Inspired by Kolson's own experience growing up in Yellowknife in the 1950s, the story is told from the perspective of an eight-year-old Metis girl living in a busy home with nine of her family members.

Kolson's work features a creative expression of what she calls the elders' brogue, the well-known cross between the inflection common to the region's aboriginal languages and the broken English forced on children by the residential school system under colonialism. The young narrator quotes this language of her elders, in which "green eyes" is pronounced "grin ice" and "kid" is pronounced "kit."

Kolson honoured the dialect in a previous work called The Spirit Music of Misty Elders, published in the 1990 anthology of western native women authors, Writing the Circle.

She dedicated that 1990 work to her mother, Mary Morrison Kolson, and two elders who kept her family history and traditions alive after her mother died: Florence Erasmus and Dorothy Beaulieu. Kolson has written more than 200 poems and is working on five books, including a 30-page book that will include The Crazy Cats Shadow Night.