Amber Dawn
Amber Dawn is a writer and creative educator living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. She has authored nine books, most recently the poetry collection Buzzkill Clamshell, which flaunts the chronically pained body as a source of lewd feminine power. Her body of work explores queer identity, trauma-informed cultural production, and sex work justice. She has won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Debut Fiction, and the Vancouver Book Award, and her work has been nominated for a Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic and the Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes.
Writers & Books
Award History
2012 - Winner
Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers
Jury Citation
“Amber Dawn is an impressive, heart-stopping talent. Her debut novel, Sub Rosa, is a clear-eyed myth exploring the lives of young women at risk. Both fearless in its narrative and rich in its landscape of metaphor, Sub Rosa is a book that refuses to be overlooked. Dawn’s story is not just an attempt to hold the world’s darkness, but to find it some comfort too.” — 2012 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers Jury (Kamal Al-Solaylee, Ivan Coyote, and Michael V. Smith)Program History
2026 - Selector
Rising Stars
Selection
Author Selected
Works Recognized by WT