A writer and scholar from the Driftpile Cree Nation in Northern Alberta, Billy-Ray Belcourt won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection This Wound is a World, which was also a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award. His second book of poetry, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field was longlisted for Canada Reads 2020.

His debut memoir, A History of My Brief Body: A Memoir (Hamish Hamilton $25) starts with a letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard in Alberta. From there it expands to the wider, ‘broken’ world around him. It includes his experience of the legacy of colonialism, joys in life, sexual exploration and the act of writing as a survival instinct and way of grieving.

In 2020, Belcourt was an assistant professor of Indigenous creative writing at UBC.

Books:

A Minor Chorus (Hamish Hamilton, 2022) $27.95 9780735242005

A History of My Brief Body: A Memoir (Hamish Hamilton – Penguin imprint 2020) $25 978-0-7352-3778-0

NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field (poetry)

This Wound is a World (poetry)

[BCBW 2020] ILMBC2