Lindsay Nixon has won the 2019 Dayne Ogilvie Prize, an annual $5,000 prize awarded to an emerging writer from the LGBTQ community.

Nixon published their first book, the memoir nîtisânak, in 2018. The book draws from their Cree, Saulteaux and Métis background, exploring how Nixon's life has been shaped by love, loss, family and community.

Originally from the prairies, Nixon is currently a PhD student at McGill University.

Their work has been published in The Walrus, Malahat Review, Room and Teen Vogue.

"The writing of Lindsay Nixon is a triumph of decolonial and non-normative storytelling. They assert an acute refusal of the reductive expectations of tragic Indigeneity and white-centred hegemonic queerness, calling upon more rigorous, nuanced, and wholehearted aesthetics and knowledge bases," said jury members Amber Dawn and Kai Cheng Thom in a press release.

"Nixon is a new, vital voice for queercore culture, ancestral and chosen family inheritances, sex and kink positivity, and Cree and prairie wisdom. Their transformative memoir, nîtisânak, uplifts non-linear narration, poetic prose and intertextual dialogue and will surely be discussed and beloved for many, many years to come."

Two finalists, Casey Plett and Joelle Barron, will each receive $500.