Ottawa-based writer Kai Thomas has garnered a spot on the shortlist for the coveted 2024 Walter Scott Prize with his novel “In The Upper Country”.

The well regarded annual award, which comes with a prize of £25,000 ($42,963.17 Cdn), honors the finest historical fiction published in English from the previous year.

Thomas’s novel delves into the tale of young Lensinda Martin, who finds herself drawn into a gripping narrative when tasked with interviewing an elderly woman accused of killing a slave hunter in Dunmore, Alta. Rather than confessing, the woman proposes an exchange: a story for a story. Through this exchange, the intricate connections between Indigenous and Black histories in North America unfold, potentially altering Lensinda’s fate forever.

In The Upper Country has already received acclaim, having clinched the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and being named a finalist for the 2023 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.

Speaking about his inspiration for the novel, Thomas remarked, “The centrality of the Black characters’ relationships to Indigenous characters is a historical relationship that I personally hadn’t seen depicted almost at all in fiction and I was finding ample evidence of it in the history books.”

Thomas, who hails from Ottawa, is not only a writer but also a carpenter and land steward. Of Black and mixed heritage, with roots tracing back to Trinidad and the British Isles, he was highlighted as a Black writer to watch in 2023.

The judging panel for the Walter Scott Prize lauded the exceptional quality of this year’s shortlist, emphasizing the originality, innovation, ambition, durability, and quality of writing showcased in the selected works.

Competing alongside Thomas are Tom Crewe with The New Life, Kevin Jared Hosein with Hungry Ghosts, Joseph O’Connor with My Father’s House, Rose Tremain with Absolutely and Forever, and Tan Twan Eng with The House of Doors.

The winner of the prestigious prize will be unveiled on June 13, 2024. In addition to the grand prize, each shortlisted author will receive £1,500. Lucy Caldwell claimed the honor as last year’s recipient for her work These Days.