Kai Thomas

Kai Thomas is a Canadian writer from Ottawa, Ontario, whose debut novel In the Upper Country was the winner of the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
The novel is a historical fiction about the Underground Railroad, centring on a journalist for an abolitionist newspaper in rural Ontario who is interviewing a woman in jail for killing a bounty hunter who was trying to capture fugitive slaves. It was also a shortlisted finalist for the 2023 Amazon.ca [First Novel Award], the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction at the 2023 [Governor General's Awards] and the 2024 Walter Scott Prize.
Thomas is a Fiction writing mentor in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.