TORONTO – When Halifax’s Mo Kenney penned her forlorn acoustic lament “Sucker,” she was in a bad place.

Merely 19 years old at the time, she was living on her own in Halifax for the first time and working two “crappy” jobs, one at a dollar store and the other whipping together pizzas at Sobeys. Oh, and she was freshly dumped.

“So I was sitting there feeling kind of (bad) about myself and music wasn’t really going anywhere either. I was working toward something but I wasn’t sure what to do,” she recalled in a telephone interview this week. “So I got a little bit drunk in my room and started writing.”

The resultant tune helped Kenney find that direction she was searching for — and on Wednesday heralded some more good fortune.

Kenney and her tune have won the $5,000 English-language SOCAN Songwriting Prize, awarded by the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada. Quebec’s Keith Kouna won the French award for “Batiscan.”

By winning, Kenney bested a field that included Montreal’s icy electro-pop outfit Purity Ring, stylistically diverse Toronto singer/songwriter Maylee Todd, rootsy Hamilton duo Whitehorse and banjo-brandishing Toronto native Tamara Lindeman, who performs as the Weather Station.

“I was in really good company, obviously, and I wasn’t really expecting to win,” Kenney said. “I was really, really pleasantly surprised.”

Kenney, 23, released her self-titled debut last September, produced by East Coast songwriting stalwart Joel Plaskett.

She says he’ll produce her sophomore effort as well, a record still in the embryonic stages that she hopes to begin recording in the late fall.

She figures she’ll spend most of the money on making that album. But she may treat herself to a splurge on the side: a “sweet new” Gretsch Black Penguin electric guitar.

“They’re pretty badass looking,” she says with a laugh.

Meanwhile, whatever happened to that personal slump that inspired “Sucker”?

“It was over pretty quick,” she confirms.