Leanne Betasamosake
Simpson
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson was a finalist for the 2017 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for This Accident of Being Lost. She is an activist, musician, and writer of several books, including The Gift Is in the Making, Islands of Decolonial Love, and As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. In 2014, she won the inaugural RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is a faculty member at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning in Denendeh, Northwest Territories. Simpson is Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg and a member of Alderville First Nation. She lives in Peterborough, Ontario.
Award History
Jury Citation
“Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s genre-defying This Accident of Being Lost is like no other book you will ever read in your life. In a luminous interweaving of Nishnaabeg storytelling, narrative, and poetry, she constructs linked fragments in which the natural world threads through a sharp urban realm and both the sacred and profane coexist. Her intimate fictions are populated with diverse characters—a mother and child at a city ballet, lovers in a sacred boreal forest, a woman attending a firearms training course. Visionary in scope, Simpson creates decolonialized realities where the routine of day-to-day life is alive with ceremony and illumination. These are shimmering stories etched with humour, anger, and above all, love and kindness.” — 2017 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize Jury (Michael Christie, Christy Ann Conlin, and Tracey Lindberg)
