A curated list of exceptional books from talented Black Canadian authors. We’ve included a roundup of titles across genres including 2023 Writers’ Trust honourees and past beneficiaries with recent or forthcoming titles.
Through the undoing of a Nigerian ex-pat couple’s relationship comes a story of suppressed queer desire. Set in Toronto where light breezes reveal things “ugly and unknowable,” Mama’s Lullabies is poised and poetic, riveting and understated.
◢ Read more about Vincent Anioke
Perfect Little Angels is Vincent Anioke’s debut short story collection. Set largely in Nigeria, the characters in Anioke’s stories explore masculinity, religion, marginalization, suppressed queerness, and self-expression through the lens of (un)conditional love.
◢ Read more about Vincent Anioke
With contributions from historians, folklorists and other experts, Jamaican-Canadian writer Xaiver Campbell and journalist Heather Barrett explore the role of slavery and the historical presence of a Black population in Newfoundland and Labrador.
◢ Read more about Heather Barrett and Xaiver Campbell
“We’re done.” This is the text that follows an explosive fight during a night out, leaving Gary and Desiree to reflect on their friendship. As they piece together a blurry chain of events, perspectives shift from self to alter ego in an effort to untangle the facts. With the universal experience of friendship as its central, propelling force, Body So Fluorescent asks difficult questions about Blackness, otherness, and appropriation.
◢ Read more about Amanda Cordner and David di Giovanni
Esi Edugyan’s Garden of Lost Socks follows Akosua, a budding exquirologist, as she finds a new friend and a remarkable world hidden right in her very own community. Each turn of the page pulls readers deeper into Akosua’s journey, daring them to become exquirologists too and encouraging them to seek out magic in the mundane.
◢ Read more about Esi Edugyan
When I Wrap My Hair celebrates how hair wrapping ties together past and present. Lyrically written and beautifully illustrated, Shauntay Grant’s children’s book is both an act of joyful recognition and a demonstration of how knowledge is passed through generations.
◢ Read more about Shauntay Grant
Beatrice wakes up alone in a treehouse is the forest of Argilia where every creature coexists and communicates freely with one other. How she arrived in the cozy, well-stocked treehouse is as mysterious as the trail of clues written in purple handwriting. Just outside her treehouse door lives King Crocodile Croc Harry, who just may have a secret of his own. Acclaimed author Lawrence Hill makes his debut for young readers with a story about a young girl who forges a bond with an unlikely ally as they both search for identity and healing.
◢ Read more about Lawrence Hill
Triggered follows a child soldier turned new Canadian as he navigates trauma, displacement, and loss. As he attempts to settle in his new home, the opportunity for reclamation or revenge emerges, beginning a series a of fatal decision-making.
◢ Read more about Zilla Jones
In the 1930’s, Hogan Alley is a thriving Black and immigrant community located in Vancouver’s east end. Young Junie and her mother move into the neighbourhood where she quickly forms meaningful relationships that parallel her own. As Junie comes of age, her burgeoning opportunities stand in contrast to the destruction of her community.
◢ Read more about Chelene Knight
Canisia Lubrin's debut fiction departs from the real-life “Code Noir,” a set of historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original Code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine linked fictions filled with globe-wise characters who desire to live beyond the ruins of the past.
◢ Read more about Canisia Lubrin
Curious Sounds is a dialogue between two artists across various mediums. Arranged in three parts mirroring the arc of a life — the Learning, the Living, and the Leaving — this book explores themes of Blackness, grief, storytelling, and creative expression.
◢ Read more about Roger Mooking and francesca ekwuyasi
In a series of 248 brief and urgent notes, Christina Sharpe explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that form in the wake. Weaving together past artifacts, present-day realities, and possible futures, she constructs an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. Ranging in theme and tone from memory and memorial, art and beauty, history and literature, the presence of the author’s mother is constant, urging her onwards to new ways of seeing. The result is a new literary form that is as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.
◢ Read more about Christina Sharpe
The fates of two unforgettable women — one just beginning a journey of reckoning and self-discovery and the other completing her life’s last vital act — intertwine in this sweeping, deeply researched debut novel set in the Black communities of Ontario that were the last stop on the Underground Railroad.
◢ Read more about Kai Thomas
The 33rd edition of Canada’s most acclaimed fiction anthology proudly continues its tradition of promoting the work of historically marginalized writers by dedicating space to the best emerging Black writers. The Journey Prize Stories comprises a selection from submissions made by the editors of literary magazines and annual anthologies from across the country who, in their view, are the most exciting writing in English by emerging Black writers whom they have published in the past three years. Submissions of previously unpublished stories were also accepted from writers directly.
◢ Read more about the 2023 Journey Prize Winners
