Kai Cheng Thom won the CA$4,000 (about $2,975) Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers, administered by the Writers' Trust of Canada to recognize "literary promise from an emerging writer who is part of Canada's LGBTQ community."
The judges said Thom's novel 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. Thom's work is sheer joyful exuberance, creativity, and talent."