Kai Thomas is an author and educator. His background and body of work span from land stewardship, carpentry, and small-scale farming to historical research and scholarship. His debut novel, In the Upper Country, was awarded the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust prize for fiction and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction, and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. The work has been featured in news outlets such as NPR, CBC, The New York Times, and the Globe and Mail.