Erica McKeen, Harrison Mooney and K.S. Covert are the winners of the 2023 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prizes.

Now in its ninth annual year, the awards recognize the best books written by debut Canadian authors in three categories: nonfiction, literary fiction and the third highlighting a different genre of fiction each year.

The third category this year is speculative fiction.

The winners will each receive $10,000.

McKeen won the literary fiction prize for Tear.

An exploration of female rage and fear, Tear is a horror coming-of-age novel set in London, Ont. Frances is living alone in a basement apartment, about to graduate from university when she begins to question her reality. Her memories begin to fracture, her dreams meld into her childhood and there's a tapping sound growing louder and louder through her bedroom wall. Inspired by classic Gothic fiction, Tear offers an eerie insight into the narratives of young women, both real and imagined.

"Writing is the work that makes the most sense to me; it's work that hooks me to the earth, that grounds me, and that helps me map the world," McKeen said in a press statement. "Receiving this recognition validates the sacrifices I have made in order to make time for writing."

McKeen is a fiction writer currently based in Vancouver. Her short stories have been featured in many literary journals such as PRISM international and The Dalhousie Review.

"While walking in the steps of such gothic icons as Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson, McKeen manages to forge her own path: avoiding the clichéd, the gratuitous, and the overwritten to create in Tear an inventive, affecting, modern work," said this year's literary fiction judge C.S. Richardson in a statement.

Mooney won the nonfiction prize for Invisible Boy.

Invisible Boy is a memoir detailing Mooney's experiences of displacement and racism from childhood to adulthood. As a transracial adoptee to a white evangelical family, Mooney was harassed for his racial identity and forced to adhere to fundamentalist teachings in his church. Reflecting on his past, Mooney writes of his journey out of internalized anti-Blackness and his reunion with his biological mother twenty-five years later.

Mooney is a writer of West African descent, raised in B.C. As a journalist, he has written for the Vancouver Sun, the National Post and Maclean's. He is currently based in Vancouver.

"There are no tidy conclusions to be had in life, but, as Mooney shows us, we can turn back and retread our route to explore how we came to be ourselves. I couldn't put this book down, and all I cared about was the boy at its centre and who he might become," said the nonfiction judge this year, Emily Urquhart.

"Bravo to Harrison Mooney for writing this compelling, humorous, heartbreaking, and beautiful work."

K.S. Covert's book The Petting Zoos won the prize for speculative fiction.

In a post-apocalyptic world humans become drawn to both cautious and sensual exploration. The Petting Zoos is a speculative novel which takes place ten years after the virus Henny Penny took over the globe. Having lived in isolation all this time, Lily is fearful to venture back outside, even with the precautionary measures of her government. When she received an invite for a human petting zoo, she discovered many people like herself that have become touch starved.

Covert is a journalist and writer currently based in Ottawa. The Petting Zoos is her first novel.

"The Petting Zoos delivers exactly what many readers look for in their speculative fiction: something bracingly new, but rooted in a fundamental sense of humanity," said this year's speculative fiction judge Robert J. Wiersema.

Last year's winners were Jesse Wente's Unreconciled, Pik-Shuen Fung's Ghost Forest and Damhnait Monaghan's New Girl in Little Cove.