The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize Mines - his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be.  Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable.  A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation.  He is the author of the poetry collections NDN Coping Mechanisms and This Wound Is a World, which was awarded the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, and a 2018 Indigenous Voices Award.  In 2018, Belcourt was named by CBC Books as one of "14 Canadian poets to watch", one of "18 emerging writers to watch", a "Writer to know", and one of "ten young Canadians to watch" by CBC.  A History of My Brief Body marks his non-fiction debut.