Tamai Kobayashi was awarded The Writer’s Trust of Canada’s $4,000 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Emerging Writers yesterday at a ceremony hosted by NOW magazine editor Susan G. Cole. Honours of distinction went to Rae Spoon and Proma Tagore. The 8th annual prize recognizes LGBT emerging writers of any age whose published work “demonstrated great literary promise.”

Kobayashi publisher her first novel, Prairie Ostrich, with Goose Lane Editions in March, and is the author of two story collection, Exile and the Heart (Three O’Clock Press) and Quixotic Erotic (Arsenal Pulp Press). Based in Toronto, Kobayashi was born in Japan and raised in Canada.

“In Prairie Ostrich, [Kobayashi] has drawn a compelling young character, Egg Murakami, who guides us through the fault lines and intersections of family, loss, and otherness. This novel is for anyone who has spent time on the outside, looking in,” the jury citation states of the author’s latest book. This year’s jury included author and artist Anna Camilleri, Cree poet Connie Fife, and memoirist and broadcaster William Whitehead.

Spoon, a transgender musician based in Montreal, is the author of the fiction title First Spring Grass Fire, a Lambda Award finalist, and Gender Failure, a collection of essays and lyrics co-authored with Ivan E. Coyote. Both books were published with Arsenal Pulp.

Born in Kolkata, India, Proma Tagore is the author of the poetry collection language is not the only thing that breaks, and has edited two anthologies: In Our Own Voices: Learning and Teaching Toward Decolonisation (Larkuma) and The Shapes of Silence: Writing by Women of Colour and the Politics of Testimony (McGill-Queen’s University Press).