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Awards: Leah Horlick wins Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize

(photo: Maki Fotos)

(photo: Maki Fotos)

Vancouver-based poet Leah Horlick has won this year’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for emerging LGBT writers, the Writers’ Trust of Canada announced.

Horlick was recognized for her two poetry collections, Riot Lung (Thistledown Press) – shortlisted for a ReLit Award and a Saskatchewan Book Award in 2013 – and For Your Own Good (Caitlin Press), which was selected as a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association in 2016. In a release, the jury, comprised of poet Billeh Nickerson, fiction writer Casey Plett, and bookseller Anjula Gogia, commented, “Horlick’s poetry harvests solace and beauty from lands often thought too dark to cultivate. Hers is a poetry of surviving and, indeed, thriving in the spaces where prairie meets ocean and where love can be complicated. … Rarely has a poet transformed silence and taboo into such potent epiphanies.”

Horlick will be presented with the $4,000 award at a June 18 ceremony during the inaugural Canadian Writers’ Summit at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre. Two-spirited Toronto Anishinaabe and Métis poet Gwen Benaway and Toronto trans fiction writer jia qing wilson-yan will receive Honors of Distinction, with a $250 prize each.