Vancouver's Amber Dawn wins LGBT literary award

Amber Dawn, a writer, filmmaker, and performance artist based in Vancouver, has won the $4,000 Dayne Ogilvie Prize from the Writers’ Trust of Canada.

The prize, established in 2007 in memory of Dayne Ogilvie, managing editor of Xtra magazine, is given annually to an emerging gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender writer who demonstrates great literary promise.

Dawn is the author of a novel Sub Rosa, editor of Fist of the Spider Woman: Tales of Fear and Queer Desire and co-editor of With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn. The jury hailed her as "an impressive, heart-stopping talent," praising her debut novel Sub Rosa as a "clear-eyed myth exploring the lives of young women at risk."

The winner of an honorable mention and $500 is Mariko Tamaki of Toronto, who was nominated for the 2008 Governor General’s Literary Award for her graphic novel Skim.

Tamaki’s upcoming work includes a young adult novel (you) set me on fire, to be published by Penguin Canada in September 2012, and the comic book Awago Beach Babies (with Jillian Tamaki), to be published by First Second in 2013.