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Slideshow: Amber Dawn, Mariko Tamaki win Writers’ Trust LGBT author honours

Vancouver author Amber Dawn won the 2012 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Emerging Writers

The Writers’ Trust of Canada celebrated Pride in Toronto last night by honouring a pair of queer authors.

Amber Dawn was presented with the $4,000 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Emerging Writers, in recognition of her “literary promise through a body of work of exceptional quality.” Dawn, a Vancouver-based writer, filmmaker, and performance artist, is the author of the Lambda Award“winning novel Sub Rosa (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010), editor of Fist of the Spider Woman: Tales of Fear and Queer Desire (Arsenal Pulp, 2009), and co-editor of With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn (Arsenal Pulp, 2005).

The jury “ consisting of authors Kamal Al-Solaylee, Ivan E. Coyote, and Michael V. Smith “ praised Dawn as an “impressive, heart-stopping talent,” and her novel as “fearless in its narrative and rich in its landscape of metaphor … [A] book that refuses to be overlooked.”

The jury also selected Mariko Tamaki as the recipient of a $500 Honour of Distinction for her body of work, which includes the graphic novel Skim (Groundwood Books, 2008), illustrated by Jillian Tamaki; the comic book Emiko Superstar (Minx, 2008), illustrated by Steve Rolston; Fake I.D. (Women’s Press, 2005); True Lies (Women’s Press, 2002); and Cover Me (McGilligan Books, 2000). Tamaki has two books forthcoming: (you) set me on fire, a YA novel to be published by Penguin Canada in September, and Awago Beach Babies, a comic book illustrated by Jillian Tamaki to be published by First Second in 2013.

Hosted by Julie Wilson, the event took place at the 519 Church Street Community Centre. *Click through the slideshow below for photos from the party.

*Update June 27: A photo slideshow was added to the story.