DREAMING HOME shortlisted for the 2024 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize!

We’re thrilled to share that this morning, the shortlist for the 2024 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize was announced, which included Dreaming Home by Lucian Childs in the Literary Fiction category! You can view the full shortlist here.

With the tenth annual Emerging Writer Prize, Rakuten Kobo endeavours to raise the profiles of debut authors by recognizing exceptional books written by first-time Canadian authors in three categories: Literary Fiction, Nonfiction, and this year’s type of genre fiction, Mystery.

The winning authors will be announced on June 18, 2024 and awarded a $10,000 CAD cash prize in each category.

Grab your copy of Dreaming Home here!

ABOUT DREAMING HOME

Globe and Mail Best Spring Book • One of Lambda Literary Review‘s Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books of June 2023 • A Southern Review Book to Celebrate in June 2023 • A 49th Shelf Best Book of 2023

A queer coming-of-age—and coming-to-terms—follows the after-effects of betrayal and poignantly explores the ways we search for home.

When a sister’s casual act of betrayal awakens their father’s demons—ones spawned by his time in Vietnamese POW camps—the effects of the ensuing violence against her brother ripple out over the course of forty years, from Lubbock, to San Francisco, to Fort Lauderdale. Swept up in this arc, the members of this family and their loved ones tell their tales. A queer coming-of-age, and coming-to-terms, and a poignant exploration of all the ways we search for home, Dreaming Home is the unforgettable story of the fragmenting of an American family.

Photo Credit: Marc Lostracco

ABOUT LUCIAN CHILDS

Lucian Childs has been a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. He is a co-editor of Lambda Literary finalist Building Fires in the Snow: A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction and Poetry. Born in Dallas, Texas, he has lived in Toronto, Ontario, for fifteen years, since 2015 on a permanent basis.