Richard Kelly Kemick
Richard Kelly Kemick is a poet, journalist, and fiction writer. He is the author of the creative nonfiction book I Am Herod, which was shortlisted in 2020 for the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction, the poetry collection Caribou Run, and the stage play Amor De Cosmos. In 2024 Kemick published his first book of short stories, Hello, Horse, the title story of which won the 2019 Howard O’Hagan Short Story Award. Kemick lives in Calgary.
Writers & Books
Award History
Jury Citation
“Richard Kelly Kemick’s Decadence provides a narrative about interiority that is funny, curious, self-deprecating, and occasionally and gloriously ridiculous. Beneath Kemick’s wit and (truly) random obsessions is an exceptionally attentive meditation about the emotional weight of quotidian life and the strange difficulty of becoming an adult. Across a range of explorations about love, grief, loneliness, failure, family, and self-worth, Kemick is refreshingly honest about the limits of introspection, even as he offers an elaborate examination of his own catalogue of shortcomings. The result of this ‘accidental memoir of a sort’ is a deeply genuine, anxiously original, and immensely enjoyable portrait of life in progress.”—2026 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction (Katherine Ashenburg, Debra Thompson, Joshua Whitehead)Works Recognized by WT