Saadi’s debut earns prize shortlist
September 05th, 2025
Ziyad Saadi has been shortlisted for the Dayne Ogilvie prize for his novel, Three Parties (Hamish Hamilton, $34.95).
The award is a $12,000 literary award celebrating debut books by writers who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, Two-Spirit, or another part of the LGBTQ2S+ community.
A jury of authors composed of Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay, Darrin Hagen, and Janika Oza selected this year’s finalists from 27 titles representing 25 Canadian publishing imprints. Each finalist is awarded $2,000, for a total of $16,000 awarded annually. The winner will be revealed at the Writers’ Trust Awards on November 13 in Toronto.
The jury citation says the following of Saadi’s book: “Three Parties paints a portrait of a family whose calm surface belies the damage of displacement and assimilation. Using the deceptively simple device of a day in the life of an eloquently flawed protagonist as he prepares to finally reveal his true queer self, Ziyad Saadi has crafted an authentic and moving novel that explores the thrill and danger of stepping off the precipice into an unknown future, the impact of secrets and shame, the trauma of a homeland left behind, and the futility of trying to control destiny. Veering expertly from humour to heartbreak, the timeline is both fluid and frozen, allowing decades of memory to flood into the present in shattering moments of revelation. This is a coming-out story like no other: elegant and witty, while embracing a depth of pain with courage and candour.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ziyad Saadi is a Palestinian Canadian writer and filmmaker based in Vancouver. A Nicholl Fellowship semi-finalist and winner of the MPAC Hollywood Bureau pilot writing competition, his writing has appeared in Indiewire, The Independent, and The Gay & Lesbian Review. His short story “The Third or Fourth Casualty” appears in the speculative fiction anthology Thyme Travellers (Fernwood, 2024).
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