Ontario authors Vincent Anioke and Anthony Oliveira and Montreal writer Éric Chacour are the finalists for the Writers' Trust of Canada's $10,000 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for 2SLGBTQ+ emerging writers.

The annual award is presented to an author of a debut book of any genre who identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or two-spirit.

The finalists will each receive $1,000. Translators will receive a portion of the prize money.

Anioke was born and raised in Nigeria, but now lives in Ontario. He's been a finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize three times — in 2021 and 2023 and 2024 and was also named a CBC Books writer to watch in 2024.

Perfect Little Angels is a short story collection set mostly in Nigeria, pondering questions of expectation, desire and duty among its various characters. From boarding school tensions to secret rendezvous between lovers on a hill, the stories explore masculinity, religion, othering, queerness, love and self-expression.

"A slyly queer collection that is generous, destabilizing, and hungry for life, Perfect Little Angels takes us inside moments that feel bitingly real and mythically transcendent," the jury said in a statement.

Montreal writer Éric Chacour and his translator Pablo Strauss are nominated for What I Know About You.

In What I Know About You, Tarek is on the right path: he'll be a doctor like his father, marry and have children. But when he falls for his patient's son, Ali, his life is turned upside-down as he realizes his sexuality against a backdrop of political turmoil in 1960s Cairo. In the 2000s, Tarek is now a doctor in Montreal. When someone begins to write to him and about him, the past that he's been trying to forget comes back to haunt him.

"What I Know About You pulls readers into the prickled flesh of evolving forms alive with sensation, longing, fear, betrayal, and love," stated the jury.

"Tenderly, Chacour moves us toward each other with a language like poetry, a surgeon's precision, and a pulsing, undeniable purpose to face what can simply never be understood alone."

Chacour's debut novel has also been longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize.

Toronto writer Anthony Oliveira is nominated for his book Dayspring. The book is a bold reimagining of biblical tales that weaves together stories of passion, grief and destruction that echo through time.

"Ambitiously and audaciously, Anthony Oliveira transforms scripture into a poetic and erotic queer love story," said the jury.

"Dayspring crosses centuries and genres, bends fan fiction into dazzling verse, and mixes the sacred and the profane with the sublime and the perverse."

The 2023 Dayne Ogilvie winner will be announced at the Writers' Trust Awards on Nov. 19, 2024.

This year's finalists were selected by a three-person jury of writers: Jillian Christmas, Adam Garnet Jones and Hazel Jane Plante.

Anuja Varghese won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize in 2023 for Chrysalis. Earlier this year, Varghese pledged $25,000 — $5,000 per year for the next five years — to the prize, stating she wanted to use the prize to "open doors for other queer writers the way doors have been opened" for her.

Other previous winners include francesca ekwuyasi, Kai Cheng Thom, Ben Ladouceur, Farzana Doctor and Zoe Whittall.

The Writers' Trust of Canada is an organization that supports Canadian writers through literary awards, fellowships, financial grants, mentorships and more.

It also gives out seven prizes in recognition of the year's best in fiction, nonfiction and short story, as well as mid-career and lifetime achievement awards.

The organization was founded in 1976 by Margaret Atwood, Pierre Berton, Graeme Gibson, Margaret Laurence and David Young. The Dayne Ogilvie Prize began in 2007 by Robin Pacific in remembrance of her late friend and editor.