2023 Governor General's Literary Award for Literary Translation Finalist * 2023 VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award Winner * 2023 Winner John Glassco Prize for Literary Translation

A meditation on the wiles of depression, illuminated by queer and diasporic experience.

"We, nosotros, nosotras: somos sobrevivientes." Weaving prose poetry, essay, autobiography and photography in mutual contamination, Nicholas Dawson relates his own deep depression, a state never fully gone, always cohabitant. Amidst this persistence, "the body and the pen bring a plural syntax of alternative knowledges into being, one which allows us to know the world better, to know ourselves better, to better love daybreak and this sun obstinately piercing the curtain with its brazen rays."

House Within a House, in a luminous translation by D.M. Bradford, tells the story of what walls the depressed person in, what keeps them wandering inside, and what finally gets them, somehow, out of the house. The original book, Désormais, ma demeure, received the 2021 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal.

Born in Chile and based in Montréal, Nicholas Dawson is a writer, scholar, and the Literary Director of Éditions Triptyque. He is the author of La déposition des chemins (La Peuplade, 2010), Animitas (La Mèche, 2017), and Désormais, ma demeure (Triptyque, 2020), for which he received the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal and the Blue Metropolis Diversity Prize. He is also the co-author of Nous sommes un continent. Correspondance mestiza (Triptyque, 2021, with Karine Rosso), and the editor of many anthologies.

Nicholas Dawson's profile page

Darby Minott Bradford is a poet and translator. They are the author of the hybrid poetry collection Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021), which won the A.M. Klein QWF Prize for Poetry, and was a finalist for, among others, the Griffin Poetry Prize and Governor General Literary Awards. Bradford's first translation, House Within a House by Nicholas Dawson (Brick Books, 2023), received the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award and John Glassco Translation Prize, and was shortlisted for the Governor General Literary Award for Translation. Their most recent book of poetry, Bottom Rail on Top, was a Raymond Souster Award finalist. Bradford lives and works in Tio'tia:ke (Montreal) on the unceded territory of the Kanien'kehá:ka Nation.

D.M. Bradford's profile page