June is Pride Month! To celebrate, we’re highlighting the latest and greatest fiction, nonfiction, poetry and comics by 2SLGBTQ+ writers in Canada to add to your reading list this year.
A Minor Chorus by Billy Ray Belcourt
A Minor Chorus is a novel that follows an unnamed narrator who abandons his thesis and goes back to his hometown, where he has a series of conversations, bringing modern queer and Indigenous experiences into focus.
A Minor Chorus was one of the finalists on Canada Reads 2026. It was championed by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers.
Belcourt is a writer and academic from Driftpile Cree Nation in Alberta. Belcourt won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his first poetry collection, This Wound is a World. It was also a finalist for the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. He is also the author of the memoir A History of My Brief Body, which was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for nonfiction, and the short story collection Coexistence. He currently lives in Vancouver where he teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia.
Motherclown by Harriet Alida Lye
In the novel Motherclown, Elise decides to leave Niagara Falls and move to Paris to pursue clowning at an elite physical theatre school after her father dies. Her mother, Catherine, now a widow and an empty-nester, feels alone in Canada and decides to follow her daughter to Paris so she can tap back into the creativity she once experienced before becoming a mother. As Catherine tries to tell Elise a secret that left her full of regret, Elise pushes her away, feeling ambushed, and the two have to figure out how to hear one another out.
Harriet Alida Lye is a Toronto-based author. Her books include the novels Let It Destroy You and The Honey Farm, the memoir Natural Killer and the picture book Serge the Snail Without a Shell, which she co-authored with Rosa Rankin-Gee.
And Then Again Begin by H. Nigel Thomas
And Then Again Begin is volume 4 of The No Safeguards Quartet by H. Nigel Thomas. It is a novel about two married men living in Montreal. While their lives look idyllic to their friends, they hide their relationship from their parents in St. Vincent and have to contend with one of the men’s unresolved trauma and his former life as a Methodist minister.
Thomas is a Vincentian Canadian author of 14 books that span genres of fiction, poetry and literary criticism. Among his awards are the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize and the Jackie Robinson Professional of the Year Award. He lives in Montreal.
Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid
First published in 2019, Heated Rivalry is the second book in the Game Changers series and the inspiration behind the hit TV series. It tells the story of a relationship between rival professional hockey players Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov. Hollander is a Canadian who plays for the fictional Montreal Voyageurs while the Russian Rozanov plays for the Boston Bears.
They’re both at the top of their game but their secret romance, once casual, is starting to feel like something more. As the two become even closer, they are forced to choose between their love of the game and their love of each other.
Rachel Reid is an author from Nova Scotia, best known for her queer hockey romances. Her previous books include Time To Shine and the Game Changers series, which was adapted into the television series Heated Rivalry. She is the 2026 recipient of the Changemaker Award for the Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment Canada.
30:24Rachel Reid promises she’s reading your Heated Rivalry emails
A Kiss of Crimson Ash by Anuja Varghese
A Kiss of Crimson Ash tells the story of Taara, the new Queen of Abhaya, who is betrothed to Garjan, Prince of Nandapore, and must marry him whether she wants to or not. But Garjan is in love with Bhediya, a courtesan. When a thief named Roland learns of a king’s plot to find a legendary weapon, the four work together with the help of an ancient goddess to stop the power-hungry king before it’s too late.
Anuja Varghese is the author of the short story collection Chrysalis, which won the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers and the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction.
The Cure for Drowning by Loghan Paylor
The Cure for Drowning, a historical fiction novel, follows Kit McNair, who was born Kathleen to an Irish farming family in Ontario, and doesn’t fit in with the expectations of a farmgirl set out for them. When Rebekah, a German-Canadian doctor’s daughter comes to town, she, Kit and Kit’s older brother, Landon, find themselves in a love triangle which tears their families apart. All three of them separate and join different war efforts but all eventually return home — and they’ll have to move forward from their challenging and storied past.
Paylor is an Ontario-born author currently based in B.C. They have an MA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and their short fiction and essays have previously appeared in publications including Room and Prairie Fire.
The Cure for Drowning is their debut novel and was longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize and won Canada Reads 2026, where it was defended by musician and writer Tegan Quin.
Musician and writer Tegan Quin will champion The Cure for Drowning by Loghan Paylor on Canada Reads. The debates take place April 13 to 16.
Three Parties by Ziyad Saadi
In Three Parties, a queer Palestinian refugee named Firas Dareer meticulously plans to come out during his elaborate 23rd birthday dinner and brings together his family, friends, co-workers and neighbours to do so. But a flurry of people and situations threaten to derail his plans — including a cantankerous grandfather and a boss who insists Firas come into work.
Ziyad Saadi is a Vancouver writer whose work has appeared in Indiewire, The Gay & Lesbian Review and the collection Thyme Travellers. Three Parties is his first novel.
Is This A Cry For Help? by Emily Austin
Is This A Cry For Help? is a novel about a librarian who takes medical leave after undergoing a mental breakdown since learning that her ex-boyfriend passed away. When she returns to work, people are calling for book bans and a second look at the library’s DEI policies. With the help of her community, colleagues and wife, she’ll have to help rally for intellectual freedom and show the power of libraries.
Emily Austin is a writer based in Ottawa who studied English literature and library science at Western University. Her other books include Gay Girl Prayers, Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead, We Could Be Rats and Interesting Facts About Space.
Pitiful by Brandi Bird
Brandi Bird’s second poetry collection, Pitiful, details their experiences with depression and eating disorders. They interrogate the ways in which sexism and bigotry stand in the way of treating these disorders, and even make them worse. Their poems dig into body shaming and the meaning of body sovereignty, as well as the relationship between sexuality and eating disorders.
Bird is an Indigiqueer Saulteaux, Cree and Métis writer and editor from Treaty 1 territory. Their debut poetry collection, The All + Flesh, won an Indigenous Voices Award and was a finalist for both the Gerald Lampert and the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry.
Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World by Mark Waddell
After years of working at Dark Enterprises, Colin is dying to climb the corporate ladder and move forward from his low-level job. When he meets a mysterious stranger who offers him the opportunity to make it happen in exchange for a small favour, he can’t resist. But that small favour unleashes an ancient evil. In Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World, Colin will have to do whatever it takes to save it.
Mark Waddell is a writer and teacher living on Vancouver Island. He has a PhD in the history of science, medicine and technology from John Hopkins University. Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World is his debut novel.
As Good a Place as Any by Rebecca Papucaru
In the novel As Good a Place as Any, Paulina and her brother Ernesto flee Chile’s violent 1973 coup and seek refuge in Toronto. Paulina is on her way to achieving her dreams of becoming a star when she lands a big role, but when she participates in an underground abortion-rights movement, she’s forced to choose between her personal ambitions and her newfound purpose.
Rebecca Papucaru is a Montreal-based writer. Her poetry collection The Panic Room won the 2018 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry, was a finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She also wrote a novella called Yentas. As Good a Place as Any is her debut novel.
The Way Disabled People Love Each Other by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha wrote their latest poetry collection during five years of pandemic lockdown. During that time they lost a close friend and also navigated the deaths of their estranged parents. The Way Disabled People Love Each Other reckons with their personal grief, as well as the large-scale grief that disabled, racialized, queer and trans people face today. It is also a collection about love, healing and possibility in our current moment.
Piepzna-Samarasinha is the author or co-editor of 10 books, including nonfiction books The Future is Disabled and Care Work, and the memoir Dirty River. Their four previous collections of poetry include Bodymap and Tonguebreaker. After many years in Toronto and Seattle, they now live in Philadelphia.
All the Parts We Exile by Roza Nozari
All the Parts We Exile tells the story of Roza Nozari’s search for belonging as a Canadian-born daughter of Iranian immigrants. It follows her experiences visiting Iran, learning the secrets behind why her family left, finding her queer identity, rejecting it, coming back to it and everything in between.
Nozari is also known as @YallaRoza on social media and is the illustrator of children’s books including Fluffy and the Stars by T’áncháy Redvers and Mindy Kaling by Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara.
Dad Era by Jordan Abel
In Dad Era, Jordan Abel reflects on his role as a father to his daughter, Phoenix. With humour and irreverence, he examines popular internet-fuelled, often toxic ideas of what it means to be a dad. He ponders what it means to be a parent in a world that seems primed for collapse.
Abel is a queer Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of the poetry collections The Place of Scraps, which won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Un/inhabited, and Injun, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. His 2023 novel Empty Spaces won the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction.
Syncopation by Whitney French
In Syncopation, O and Z are young women, travel companions and lovers in a ravaged world. As a decades-long earthquake persists and people are forced to hide from deadly acid rain, the two women try to reconcile their ultimately different values — until a fateful choice must be made.
Whitney French is a writer, artist and publisher based in Toronto. She edited the anthology Black Writers Matter, which won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Publishing in 2020. Syncopation is her first novel.
The Tiger and the Cosmonaut by Eddy Boudel Tan
The Tiger and the Cosmonaut centres on Casper Han, who is brought back to his remote B.C. hometown when his father disappears. His father is later found wandering the nearby woods, confused and clutching a pair of scissors, trapped in the memory of the tragic night when Casper’s twin brother went missing 20 years before.
The Tiger and the Cosmonaut was shortlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize.
Eddy Boudel Tan is a writer based in Vancouver. His other works include After Elias and The Rebellious Tide. Tan has been a finalist for the Edmund White Award, the ReLit Best Novel Award, and the Ferro-Grumley Award. He was named a Rising Star by Writers’ Trust of Canada in 2021.
Staying Power by Zena Sharman
Staying Power by Zena Sharman is a collection of essays about Sharman’s experiences with queerness and collectively raising her children with chosen family members while healing from trauma.
Sharman is a writer who lives in Duncan, B.C. She has edited a number of essay collections, including The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care, which won a Lambda Award in 2017.
Cannon by Lee Lai
In the graphic novel Cannon, the titular character is a stoic and well-behaved cook who does something unexpected. When she finds herself left to close up the restaurant she works at, she destroys the place. With tables and chairs upended and smashed plates littering the ground, her best friend Trish shows up to help her make sense of exactly what’s going on with her.
Lee Lai is an Australian cartoonist based in Montreal. She made the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 list for her debut graphic novel, Stone Fruit, which also won the Lambda Literary Award for Graphic Novel, the Cartoonist Studio Prize, the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize and two Ignatz Awards. Cannon won the 2026 Doug Wright Award and was shortlisted for the 2026 Carol Shields Prize.
21:04Lee Lai finds her voice in Cannon
Queers at the Table edited by Alex D. Ketchum and Megan J. Elias
Queers at the Table is an anthology of essays, comics and recipes that explores the many nourishing ways queerness shapes food production and restaurant culture. It celebrates how food empowers, transforms and brings together queer and trans communities.
Alex D. Ketchum is an assistant professor at McGill University specializing in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist studies. She is also the author of Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses. Ketchum is based in Montreal.
Megan J. Elias is an associate professor and director of the Food Studies Program at Boston University. They are the author of five books on food history, including Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture. They live in Brooklyn, New York.
Look Ma, No Hands by Gabrielle Drolet
When writer and cartoonist Gabrielle Drolet developed a condition that made her unable to use her hands, she had to figure out how to express herself in new ways. Her memoir Look Ma, No Hands explores how her life was changed by disability and how she navigates everything from mundane tasks to complicated healthcare systems, first dates and moving apartments. With humour and honesty, she shares her path to making peace with life’s curveballs and her profound commitment to finding ways to create.
Drolet is a journalist, essayist and cartoonist. Her writing has appeared in New York Times, The Walrus, VICE and Teen Vogue and won gold at the Canadian Online Publishing Award. She lives in Montreal.
24:30Gabrielle Drolet is finding new ways to create with chronic hand pain
Lake Life by Tanya Boteju
Best friends Maya and Rashida used to spend every summer together at Spruce Lake, but this summer feels different. Ever since Maya confessed her love to her, it’s been a bit awkward. In the YA novel Lake Life, Maya hatches a fake dating scheme with the new girl in town, Gabe. As the two try to make Rashida jealous, feelings twist and turn, set against the backdrop of a small lake town.
Tanya Boteju is a YA writer and part-time English teacher. Her other novels include Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens, Bruised and Messy Perfect. She currently lives in Vancouver.
Lateral Sway by Hannah Karpinski
In her debut book of poetry, Lateral Sway, Hannah Karpinski draws from personal and collective experience of queer friendship and desire. She examines how connection persists across time, distance and displacement. Her collection asks how we make room for others when their stories are not ours to tell.
Karpinski is a queer writer from Toronto. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies, including Commo Mag, Voicemail Poems and the digital anthology My Loves: Digital Anthology of Queer Love Poems.
Rainbow Wisdom by Mischa Oak
Rainbow Wisdom: 18 LGBTQ+ Life Lessons for everyone is a book drawn from the lived experiences of 2SLGBTQ+ people, highlighting how these lessons can help everyone, regardless of their sexual or gender identity, to walk proudly and live a more fulfilling life.
Oak is a Vancouver-based 2SLGBTQ+ advocate and speaker who gives keynote talks around the world about the importance and benefits of embracing the queer communities. Rainbow Wisdom is his first book.
Cruising the Downtown edited by Kristopher Wells
Edmonton has a vibrant and thriving 2SLGBTQ+ community, and Cruising the Downtown shares its often unknown history. Building on the work of the Edmonton Queer History Project, the book celebrates the people, places and events that have shaped — and continue to shape — the city’s queer past and present.
Kristopher Wells is a Canadian educator, 2SLGBTQ+ rights advocate and senator currently representing Alberta. He has received the Alberta Award for the Study of Canadian Human Rights and Multiculturalism and Alberta Teachers’ Association’s Public Education Award, among others. Cruising the Downtown is his first book.
Blackheart Man by Nalo Hopkinson
Blackheart Man is a fantasy novel about the magical island of Chynchin. It follows Veycosi who is training as a griot (historian and musician) and is hoping to score a spot on Chynchin’s Colloquium of scholars. Blackheart Man explores themes of Black self-actualization and empowerment within a world of African and Caribbean-inspired history, myth, fantasy and magic.
Nalo Hopkinson is the author of many novels and short stories, including Brown Girl in the Ring, which won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest and was defended on Canada Reads in 2008 by Jemeni. Her other books include Sister Mine, Midnight Robber, The Chaos, The New Moon’s Arms and Skin Folk. In 2021, she won the Damon Knight Grand Master award, a lifetime achievement award for science fiction.
Bookends with Mattea Roach33:58Nalo Hopkinson: How Caribbean folktales inspired her fantastical novel, Blackheart Man
Nalo Hopkinson’s latest work, Blackheart Man, is a dynamic sci-fi story that took 15 years to complete. The novel takes readers to the fantastical land of Chynchin, which was inspired by Afro-Caribbean histories and traditions. Nalo joins Mattea Roach to discuss the folktale-inspired world her characters live in, and the process of crafting a utopian novel while battling financial insecurity and chronic illness.
Outspoken by Betty Baxter
Outspoken is a book by Betty Baxter about her rise through ever-intensifying levels of sports with huge success, only to be fired from her job as a volleyball coach in 1982 because rumours came out about her sexuality. She then turned to activism, exposing the shameful reality of dominant structures in the world of competitive sports.
Baxter was an Olympic volleyball athlete and coach who is well known 2SLGBTQ+ community and human rights advocate. She founded Canadian Women & Sport in 1981 and served as a member, advisor, or founder of several other sports councils and organizations. She lives in Roberts Creek, B.C.
How I Bend Into More by Tea Gerbeza
A long poem exploring Tea Gerbeza’s experience with scoliosis, How I Bend Into More shares how she finds herself amidst ableism and trauma. Illustrations and verse weave together, representing and reclaiming the disabled body of the speaker.
Gerzeba is a poet and multimedia artist from Regina. She won the Ex-Puritan’s 2022 Austin Clark Prize in Literary Excellence for poetry and was a finalist for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for 2SLGBTQ+ emerging writers. How I Bend Into More is her first book of poetry.
Soundtrack by Michael V. Smith
In the poetic memoir Soundtrack, Michael V. Smith reflects on growing up gay under the shadow of AIDS, and uses songs and albums to capture the last three decades of the millennium. He explores social prejudices, court rulings, medical breakthroughs and personal moments of loss, joy, love and community — from first crushes to dancing at gay bars.
Smith is a writer, filmmaker and professor of creative writing at University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus. His other books include his memoir My Body Is Yours, the poetry collection Queers Like Me and the novel Bad Ideas. He currently lives in Kelowna, B.C.
Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions by Ahmad Saber
Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions is a YA novel about a Muslim teen coming to terms with who he truly is and what he wants out of his life. Ramin has always listened to his parents and followed the teachings of Allah, but when he realizes he has a crush on the captain of his soccer team, his faith is tested. Crushing on a boy was never part of the plan, so why does it feel like Ramin is not being true to himself if he pushes away his feelings?
Ahmad Saber is a Pakistani Canadian writer and a doctor specializing in rheumatology and internal medicine. Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions is his first novel, inspired by his own experiences growing up as a queer Muslim.
Post-Man by Alex Manley
In Post-Man, neurodivergent non-binary author Alex Manley shares their lifelong feelings of being apart, alone and othered. The memoir explores their experience of navigating masculinity, from growing up steeped in hockey culture, to working for a men’s website, to coming to terms with going bald as a non-binary person.
Manley is a non-binary writer, editor, translator, and poet based in Montreal. They are the author of We Are All Just Animals & Plants and The New Masculinity, and the translator of Made-Up by Daphné B.
