Eaton Hamilton

Kai Cheng Thom, right, with Amber Dawn (ed. of A Place Called No Homeland).

The three shortlisted authors, l-r: Carellin Brooks standing in for Eva Crocker, Kai Cheng Thom and Ali Blythe

Leah Horlick, host

Ali Blythe

Kai Cheng Thom

Carellin Brooks standing in for Eva Crocker

Big congrats to the shortlisted authors for the 2017 Dayne Ogilvie Award: Ali Blythe, Eva Crocker and Kai Cheng Thom. Reading your books was an honour and a pleasure, and awarding this year’s prize to Kai Cheng Thom on behalf of prize founder Robin Pacific, the Writer’s Trust, and my co-jurors Elio Iannacci and Trish Salah, was a wonderful celebration of queer writing.

Here is the jury citation:

“Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is a delicious and fabulist refashioning of a trans memoir as fiction. It is a cacophonous coming-of-age story and a genre-breaking refusal of the idea that the only stories trans people have to tell are their autobiographies. Her poems in A Place Called No Homeland are jelly-tender, tough as knives. They ride the borderland into and through trauma, relationships, love, and power, and carry us out deepened and changed over to the other side. Her work is sheer joyful exuberance, creativity, and talent.”

Congratulations, Kai!