Transatlantic is honoured to announce that for the 2023 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize Awards, the Speculative Fiction prize has been awarded to K.S. Covert for THE PETTING ZOOS, published by Dundurn Press and the Nonfiction prize has been awarded to Harrison Mooney for INVISIBLE BOY, published by HarperCollins Canada!
The Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize is now in its ninth year. The winners were selected rom a shortlist of talented debut Canadian writers chosen by Kobo’s team of booksellers, with book completion rates, customer ratings and reviews taken into consideration.
More about the winning books and authors:
THE PETTING ZOOS by K.S. Covert
In a virus-fearing world, skin hunger can drive you crazy — and human petting zoos can return you to yourself.
Ten years after the deadly virus nicknamed Henny Penny, the world has largely recovered — there’s an interim government as well as law and order, and life is returning to normal for the greatly reduced population. But despite effective vaccines, the law still requires people to wear protective masks and gloves at all times in public, and many still fear a resurgence of the virus. On top of this, people who haven’t been touched in years are going crazy from skin hunger.
Lily has lived in fearful isolation for ten years, afraid to rejoin the world. But a return-to-work order and an invitation to go to a petting zoo — a highly illegal club where people go to touch and be touched — start to bring her back to life.
A post-apocalyptic sex adventure and a woman’s journey of self-discovery, The Petting Zoos is an erotic love story for an age of extreme caution, in which the value of safety itself is questioned.
K.S. Covert examined her talents and realized she had two options for a career: writer or rock singer. Writing seemed more stable, and a career in journalism ensued. But always the idea of living to write, instead of just writing to live, bedevilled her. The Petting Zoos is her first novel. She lives in Ottawa.
K.S. is represented by Samantha Haywood and Laura Cameron.
INVISIBLE BOY by Harrison Mooney
A powerful, experiential journey from white cult to Black consciousness: Harrison Mooney’s riveting story of self-discovery lifts the curtain on the trauma of transracial adoption and the internalized antiblackness at the heart of the white evangelical Christian movement.
Inspired by Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man the same way Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me was inspired by James Baldwin, Harrison Mooney’s debut memoir will captivate readers with his powerful gift for storytelling, his keen eye for insight and observation, and his wry sense of humor.
As an adopted and homeschooled Black boy with ADHD at white fundamentalist Christian churches and tent revivals, Mooney was raised amid a swirl of conflicting and confusing messages and beliefs. Within that radical and racist right-wing bubble along the U.S. border in Canada’s Bible Belt, Harrison was desperate to belong and to be “visible” to those around him.
But before ultimately finding his own path, Harrison must first come to understand that the forces at work in his life were not supernatural, but the same trauma and systemic violence that has terrorized Black families for generations. Reconnecting with his birth mother–and understanding her journey–leads Harrison to a new connection with himself: the eyes looking down were my true mother’s eyes, and the face was my true mother’s face, and for the first time in my life, I saw that I was beautiful.
Harrison Mooney is a writer and journalist. Born to a West African immigrant mother, he was adopted as an infant by a white family and raised in the Bible belt of British Columbia. He has worked for the Vancouver Sun for nearly a decade as a reporter, an editor and a columnist. His writing has also appeared in the National Post, the Guardian, Yahoo and Maclean’s. Harrison Mooney lives in East Vancouver with his family.
Harrison is represented by Samantha Haywood.
To learn more about the awards, click here: https://www.kobo.com/media-hub/rakuten-kobo-emerging-writer-prize
Congratulations K.S. and Harrison!