June is Pride Month. To celebrate, we've curated a list of the latest fiction, nonfiction, poetry and comics by 2SLGBTQ+ writers in Canada to read throughout the year. 

In elseship, Tree Abraham recounts the emotional rollercoaster of falling in love with her housemate, who did not return her feelings. The book blends personal reflections, research, illustrations, photos and diagrams, all organized within the eight ancient Greek categories of love. It explores the beauty and pain of unrequited love while challenging the traditional heteronormative narrative of romance. 

Abraham is a Brooklyn-based writer, art director and book designer. Originally from Ottawa, she is also the author of Cyclettes.

In Everything Is Fine Here, a younger sister navigates the challenges of family and societal pressures while offering love and support to her older sister, who is gay, in a country with strict anti-homosexuality laws.

Iryn Tushabe is a Ugandan Canadian writer and journalist based in Regina. Her writing has appeared in Briarpatch Magazine, Adda, Grain Magazine, The Walrus and CBC Saskatchewan, among others. She won the City of Regina writing award in both 2020 and 2024, and was a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2021. In 2023, she won the Writers' Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. Tushabe was longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Prize in 2016.

Through the poet's reflections on growing up queer and Korean Canadian, i cut my tongue on a broken country poignantly details her coming-of-age that's marked with beauty, pain and a quest for love. 

Kyo Lee is a queer high school student from Waterloo, Ont. Her work is featured in PRISM International, Nimrod, The Forge Literary Magazine and This Magazine, among others. She is the youngest winner of the CBC Poetry Prize, for her poem lotus flower blooming into breasts, and the youngest finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. 

Having built a new life in Vancouver with his boyfriend, Casper Han rarely returns to his hometown, a small remote town in B.C., in The Tiger and the Cosmonaut. But when a crisis forces him and his siblings to reunite, they are compelled to confront a long-avoided tragedy — the mysterious disappearance of his twin brother more than 20 years ago.

Eddy Boudel Tan is a writer based in Vancouver, where he co-founded the Sidewalk Supper Project. His previous works include the novels After Elias and The Rebellious Tide. Tan has been a finalist for the Edmund White Award, the ReLit Best Novel Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award and was named a Rising Star by Writers' Trust of Canada in 2021. His work has appeared in Joyland and Yolk, among others. 

In We Could Be Rats, Margit has always found it difficult to understand her sister Sigrid, who rejected the conventional path of life, never graduating high school, and preferring instead, to roam the streets with her best friend Greta. When Margit, for the first time, tries to connect with her sister, she uncovers the heartwrenching reasons behind her sister's choices. 

Emily Austin is a writer based in Ottawa who studied English literature and library science at Western University. She is also the author of the novels Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead and Interesting Facts About Space, and the poetry collection Gay Girl Prayers. 

echolalia echolalia a collection of poems focus on the body politic and the experiences of being queer, disabled and in the diaspora. Reflecting on her own identities, Shi writes about chosen family and resisting colonial projects and ideologies that seek to dehumanize. 

Shi is a writer and poet based in B.C. Her writing has appeared in the Disability Visibility Blog and Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry. Shi graduated from the Writer's Studio Online program at Simon Fraser University and StoryStudio Chicago. She is the winner of The Capilano Review's 2022 In(ter)ventions in the Archive Contest.

Following the medically assisted death of her partner of 22 years, cartoonist Sarah Leavitt began small sketches that quickly became something new and unexpected to her. The abstract images mixed with poetic text, layers of watercolour, ink and coloured pencil combine in Something, Not Nothing to tell a story of love, grief, peace and new beginnings.

Leavitt is a Vancouver comics creator and writing teacher. Her debut book was Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me.

Packed with sharp, candid and sensual verses, Buzzkill Clamshell is a collection of poems that explore themes of sick and disabled queerness, aging and desire.

Amber Dawn is a Vancouver-based author, editor and creative facilitator. Her previous works include the novels Sub Rosa, which won the Lambda Literary Award, and Sodom Road Exit, as well as poetry collections Where the Words End and My Body Begins and My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems.

The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman is a memoir-in-essays that explores how a love of "dad rock" music helped Niko Stratis come to a better understanding of life, love and the world around them. Stratis was a closeted 20-something trans woman working in her dad's glass shop in the Yukon Territory during the time when "dad rock" bands like Wilco, Radiohead and The National were regular fixtures on the radio and in rock culture circles. 

The incisive essays in the book examine how Stratis discovered a sense of queer and trans identity and belonging by way of listening to "emotionally available" artists such as Neko Case and Sharon Van Etten within this subgenre.

Stratis is a Canadian writer, author and critic from Toronto by way of the Yukon. Her writing has appeared in publications like Catapult, Spin and Paste.

In From the Rez to the Runway, Christian Allaire shares his journey from growing up on the Nipissing First Nation reserve to breaking into the world of high fashion in New York City, navigating the challenges and realities of the industry. He shares the difficulty of balancing his ambitions with the often-inaccurate perceptions — including his own — of his culture's place in the realm of fashion, offering a powerful story of staying true to yourself while pursuing your dreams.

Allaire is an Ojibway writer from Nipissing First Nation. He earned a Bachelor of Journalism from Ryerson University in 2014, and he has since written for publications such as Footwear News, Refinery29, Elle, Hazlitt, Mr. Porter and The National Post. Currently, he is the senior Fashion and Style Writer for Vogue. 

Allaire is also the author of The Power of Style, a YA nonfiction book that highlights the need for diversity and representation in fashion — and examines topics such as cosplay, make up, hijabs, and hair to show the intersection of style, culture and social justice over the years. Allaire won Canada Reads 2022, championing Five Little Indians by Michelle Good.

The Afterdark is a queer YA novel following Evie Laurent, a student at a prestigious boarding school harbouring dark enchanting secrets. At Northcroft when night falls, the Afterdark covers the surrounding forest with unseen horrors, some of which call to Evie and Holland Morgan, the girl she's quickly falling for. Faced against mysterious and macabre challenges outside their hallowed halls, Evie and Holland must also reckon with the darkness in themselves.

E. Latimer is a writer from Victoria, B.C. After gaining an audience on Wattpad of over 100,000 followers, she went on to write several novels for young readers such as The Strange and Deadly Portraits of Bryony Gray, Escape to Witch City and Witches of Ash and Ruin. 

Everything and Nothing At All is an essay collection that discusses Jenny Heijun Wills' quest for belonging as a transnational and transracial adoptee, a pansexual and polyamorous person and a parent with a life-long eating disorder. Drawing on her life experiences, she creates a vision of family — chosen, adopted and biological all at once. 

Wills is a writer born in Seoul and raised in Southern Ontario. Her memoir Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related won the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Award for Nonfiction and the 2020 Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book. She currently lives in Winnipeg and teaches English at the University of Winnipeg.

A young gay man finds romance in the novel I Remember Lights, when he goes to Montreal during the spectacular celebrations of Expo '67. However, he is struck with the harsh dilemma that many like him must confront — the choice between happiness and safety — when the 1977 police raid on the Truxx gay bar shakes his world.

Ben Ladouceur is an award-winning poet from Ottawa. His first collection Otter, an exploration and celebration of friendship, love and queerness, won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best debut collection. Ladouceur's book Mad Long Emotion won the Archibald Lampman Award. In 2018, Ladouceur received the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ emerging writers. CBC Books named Ladouceur a writer to watch in 2019.

I Hate Parties is a collection of 50 poems on Jes Battis' experiences of being queer, autistic and nonbinary. Focusing on the feelings of intense anxiety that come with growing up in the nineties in Canada as a marginalized person, Battis writes of adolescence, queer parties and panic attacks through metaphor and honest verse.

Battis is a queer autistic writer and teacher at the University of Regina, splitting their time between the prairies and the west coast. They wrote the Occult Special Investigator series and Parallel Parks series. Battis' first novel, Night Child, was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award. Their novel The Winter Knight was on the Canada Reads 2024 longlist. 

Ferocious and vulnerable, a body more tolerable examines Indigenous grief, trans identity and frustrated desires through visceral poems that pulsate with yearning and possibility. 

jaye simpson is an Oji-Cree Saulteaux Indigiqueer writer and activist from the Sapotaweyak Cree Nation. Their debut poetry collection it was never going to be okay was shortlisted for the 2021 ReLit Award and the Writers' Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize and won the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Poetry in English.

In What I Know About You, Tarek is on the right path: he'll be a doctor like his father, marry and have children. But when he falls for his patient's son, Ali, his life is turned upside-down as he realizes his sexuality against a backdrop of political turmoil in 1960s Cairo. In the 2000s, Tarek is now a doctor in Montreal. When someone begins to write to him and about him, the past that he's been trying to forget comes back to haunt him. 

What I Know About You was on the shortlists for the 2024 Giller Prize and the 2024 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.

Chacour is a Montreal-based writer who was born to Egyptian parents and grew up between France and Quebec. In addition to writing, he works in the financial sector. What I Know About You is his first book and was a bestseller in its French edition, winning many awards including the Prix Femina. 

Strauss has translated 12 works of fiction, several graphic novels and one screenplay. He was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for translation for The Country Will Bring Us No Peace, Synapses and The Longest Year. His translation of Le plongeur by Stephane Larue called The Dishwasher won the 2020 Amazon First Novel Award. He lives in Quebec City. 

In Ring of Dust, Louise Marois weaves an ambitious collection of poems that's a dialogue between many pluralities — then and now, family and entourage, lover and nature, mother and death, work-person and artist, fables and confidences, limits and new reaches, home and escape, city and field, queer life and a blood red world. 

Marois is a Montreal-based writer and artist. Her debut poetry collection La peau des yeux won the Jacqueline-Déry-Mochon prize and she has been a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award twice.

In A Different Hurricane, teenage best friends Gordon and Allen are in love with each other, but they're forced apart by the fear of how their community with traditional views will react. After returning home from studying abroad, they must do all they can to hide their relationship when Gordon's wife exposes his affair, putting their lives in danger.

H. Nigel Thomas is a Vincentian Canadian writer. He is the author of 13 books that span the genres of fiction, poetry and literary criticism. He has won many awards, including the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize in 2022, the Jackie Robinson Professional of the Year Award and the Black Theatre Workshop's Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award. He currently lives in Montreal. 

The Fragments that Remain is a story told through letters and poetry about two siblings and the valley of grief that separates them. Ally and Andy were considered honorary twins, with either born at the start and end of the same year, and extremely close their whole lives until tragically Ally dies. In this tragic and heartfelt YA novel, Andy discovers her bisexuality, Indigenous identity and the pieces of her brother that remain.

Mackenzie Angeconeb is an Anishinaabekwe writer, artist and educator from Lac Seul First Nation and currently based in Sioux Lookout, Ont. As an artist she designs bead earrings and watercolours. The Fragments that Remain is their first novel.

Curiosities is a novel that centres around an amateur historian who discovers an obscure memoir from 1600s England that explores a love that could not be explained in those times. Weaving together different fictional accounts, the novel tells the life stories of Joan and Thomasina, the only two survivors of a village ravaged by the plague, and how they eventually find each other again — Thomasina, now Tom, navigating the world in boy's clothes and as a male — and the struggles they face when they're discovered, naked, by a member of the clergy. 

Fleming is an author based in Victoria, B.C. Her books include Pool-Hopping and Other Stories, which was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and her middle-grade novel, The Goat, which was a Junior Library Guild and White Ravens selection.

After missing his dream team, hockey player Jaylen "JJ" Jones hooks up with a stranger in Shoot Your Shot. Soon later, he lands a spot with the Seattle Rainiers — and starts thinking she's his good luck charm. He offers bisexual tattoo artist Lucy Ross a no-strings deal to keep seeing him, and she agrees — for a price. But as the lines blur, what began as a casual arrangement turns unexpectedly real. 

Lexi LaFleur Brown is a writer originally from North Bay, Ont., now based in Seattle. She holds a master's degree in public relations and a PhD in education. Shoot Your Shot is her debut novel.

Former hockey player Riley Tuck thought he left everything behind when he returned to his hometown of Avery River, N.S., ten years ago — including a broken heart. But when tragedy strikes in The Shots You Take, his ex-teammate and former best friend with benefits, Adam Sheppard, reenters his life. As they confront their shared past, long-buried feelings resurface, forcing them to face what was never truly over. 

Rachel Reid is an author from Nova Scotia, best known for her queer hockey romances. Her previous books include the Game Changer series and Time to Shine. Her book Heated Rivalry is being adapted into a tv series by Letterkenny's Jacob Tierney.

In Time and Tide, Sam is thrust into the 1800s after surviving a plane crash. There, she meets her new landlady — a world-famous author — and as the two grow closer, their bond begins to alter the course of history.

J.M. Frey is a Toronto-based author and actor with a master's degree in communications and culture. Her debut novel, Triptych, was nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards, won the San Francisco Book Festival Award for Science Fiction/Fantasy, was a finalist for the 2011 CBC Bookie Awards and was named one of The Advocate's Best Overlooked Books of 2011.

The Boy Who Was Saved By Jazz tells the story of Robert, raised by his grandparents in small-town Saskatchewan after his father's death and mother's abandonment. As he discovers music, his Métis identity and his budding bisexuality, he unravels family secrets while navigating the challenges of growing up and finding his place in the world.

Tom Bentley-Fisher is a Saskatchewan-born writer based in Alameda, Calif. His work has been featured in the Grain, The Dalhousie Review and NeWest Review, among others. Bentley-Fisher's short story collection Blind Man's Drum, was a Saskatchewan Book Awards finalist and his short stories Wars and Rumours of War were a National Magazine Award for Humour finalist. He has served as the artistic director for five professional theaters across Canada, the U.S. and Spain, where he has developed and directed more than 100 productions. His play Friends was published by Red Deer Press.

Set in 2067 at a vibrant queer women retirement resort in Florida, Palm Meridian follows Hannah Cardin, who faces a terminal cancer diagnosis after a decade of peaceful living. Hoping for closure and one last chance at love, she invites Sophie, the woman she hasn't seen since their painful breakup over 40 years ago. When a long-buried secret emerges, Hannah is forced to question whether she's truly ready to say goodbye.

Grace Flahive, originally from Toronto, now lives in London. She studied English literature at McGill University. Palm Meridian is her debut novel.