Metonymy Press

  • 2021

    ZOM-FAM was long-listed for the 2021 League of Canadian Poets Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and Kama La Mackerel was a finalist for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LBGTQ2S+ Emerging Writers.

    2020

    In 2020, as the global pandemic descended, Hazel Jane Plante’s debut experimental novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) received a flurry of awards nominations—the BC and Yukon Book Prizes Jim Deva Prize and the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature—and wins: the Expozine Alternative Press award for English literature as well as the Lammy for Transgender Fiction. You can watch her acceptance speech for the latter here.

    In the fall, Kama La Mackerel’s ZOM-FAM was a finalist for the QWF First Book Prize.

    2019

    In 2019, Jas M. Morgan’s memoir nîtisânak won the QWF Concordia University First Book Prize, and it was nominated for the QWF Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction, an Indigenous Voices Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. Jas also won the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers.

    Lindsay Nixon holding their book, smiling, at a podium. Photo credit: Writers' Trust.

    Photo credit: Writers’ Trust

    2018

    Trish Salah was awarded an Honour of Distinction from the 2018 Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Emerging Writers.

    2017

    June 2017 was an eventful month for us. Two Metonymy authors were honoured with significant literary awards.

    Congrats to Kai Cheng Thom, who received the 2017 Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers. Kai Cheng was presented with the award at a ceremony on June 4 in Vancouver, BC.

    Less than two weeks later, jia qing wilson-yang’s Small Beauty won the 2017 Lambda Literary Prize for Transgender Fiction. Metonymy was well-represented in the category (there were three finalists in total, with Kai Cheng’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars also nominated alongside If I Was Your Girl, by Meredith Russo).

    2016

    Small Beauty by jia qing wilson-yang was awarded an Honour of Distinction from the 2016 Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Emerging Writers.

  • New Metonymy Titles

    In Fall 2021, we published two titles by local writers.

    Personal Attention Roleplay is Helen Chau Bradley’s debut fiction title: an at once eerie and invigorating collection of stories, it spans Montreal neighbourhoods, swimming pools and gym mats, and the dark open road on a tour gone awry. Though their stories are diverse in points of view, length, and form, “Chau Bradley is adept at creating complex characters with inner lives and motivations that feel unique to them, while still being relatable, flawed, and human,” as Billie Gagné-LeBel wrote in a feature article in the Montreal Review of Books.

    Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch’s second book, The Good Arabs, was our first title of theirs, and it is also genre-defying, containing a short story at the centre of a poetry collection. El Bechelany-Lynch and Chau Bradley both include all-dialogue pieces in their work, and in The Good Arabs these occur as a refrain throughout the collection. The book’s “thoughtful, mutable, quality,” as a McGill Daily review put it, extends through its mapping of Arab and trans identity through the immensity of experience felt in one body, the sorrow of citizens let down by their countries, and the garbage crisis in Lebanon. 

    Earlier, in Spring 2021, we published our first collection of short stories, A Natural History of Transition, by Portland-based author Callum Angus. Cal launched the collection virtually in a number of places, partnering with bookstores and brilliant readers and interviewers in a number of locations to discuss the ongoing nature of transness, the myth of nature as fixed and unchanging, and the element of horror in his work. Again, the collection varies in length and style — the “eight tales show a staggeringly virtuosic range” according to a Gertrude Press review — but readers comment as well on its cohesiveness.

    At the beginning of 2021 we published our first picture book, the long-awaited Dear Black Girls, written by Shanice Nicole and illustrated by Kezna Dalz. A brightly illustrated, celebratory ode, this book was sought after by booksellers, community groups, libraries, and a bunch of very tiny readers, some of whom were captured reading the book in extremely heartwarming images which were passed along to the creators.

  • Metonymy Press publishes literary fiction and nonfiction by emerging writers.  We try to reduce barriers to publishing for authors whose perspectives are underrepresented in order to produce quality materials relevant to queer, feminist, and social justice communities. We really want to keep gay book lovers satisfied.

  • Email: publish@metonymypress.com

    Phone: 438-338-4591

    Snail mail: PO Box 143 BP Saint-Dominique, Montreal, QC, H2S 3K6

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