2023 Governor General's Literary Award for Literary Translation Finalist * 2023 VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award Winner * 2023 Winner John Glassco Prize for Literary Translation

A meditation on the wiles of depression, illuminated by queer and diasporic experience.

"We, nosotros, nosotras: somos sobrevivientes." Weaving prose poetry, essay, autobiography and photography in mutual contamination, Nicholas Dawson relates his own deep depression, a state never fully gone, always cohabitant. Amidst this persistence, "the body and the pen bring a plural syntax of alternative knowledges into being, one which allows us to know the world better, to know ourselves better, to better love daybreak and this sun obstinately piercing the curtain with its brazen rays."

House Within a House, in a luminous translation by D.M. Bradford, tells the story of what walls the depressed person in, what keeps them wandering inside, and what finally gets them, somehow, out of the house. The original book, Désormais, ma demeure, received the 2021 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal.

Born in Chile and based in Montréal, Nicholas Dawson is a writer, scholar, and the Literary Director of Éditions Triptyque. He is the author of La déposition des chemins (La Peuplade, 2010), Animitas (La Mèche, 2017), and Désormais, ma demeure (Triptyque, 2020), for which he received the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal and the Blue Metropolis Diversity Prize. He is also the co-author of Nous sommes un continent. Correspondance mestiza (Triptyque, 2021, with Karine Rosso), and the editor of many anthologies.

Nicholas Dawson's profile page

David Bradford is a poet, editor, and organizer based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). He is the author of several chapbooks, including Nell Zink is Damn Free (Blank Cheque Press, 2017) and The Plot (House House Press, 2018). His work has appeared in The Capilano Review, The Tiny, filling Station, The Fiddlehead, Carte Blanche, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Guelph and is a founding editor of House House Press. Dream of No One but Myself is his first book.

D.M. Bradford's profile page

"The searching, confessional, and deeply intelligent voice of House Within a House is a flashlight beam that takes the reader into and through the territory of a depression — but this light lingers, so that at the book's close we are left with the glow of language naming the overlooked, blinking at its cumulative power." — Sadiqa de Meijer

"Nicholas Dawson's House Within a House is about the creative process and all the anguish and hard-fought joy that surrounds it. This book, which so expertly employs philosophical, memoiristic, and visual modes, is deeply human; it seeks to affirm in all of us the part of our personhood that waits for us 'on the other side of depression' — a task as urgent as any in our current moment. This book will mean a lot to a whole range of readers." — Billy-Ray Belcourt

"I love this book because I know what it's like to dwell in the house of depression and how hard it can be to communicate the experience. Nicholas Dawson uses his poetic creativity to describe the house within a house — both the prison of the mind and the look and feel of rugs, floorboards, chair legs, and windowsills. His words and pictures make the dark corners and impasses a little less lonely. And chart paths for getting out of the house." — Ann Cvetkovich

"Bradford's translation is pretty close to perfect: from the demeure to the house nothing is lost, even as the English finds its own voice in Bradford." — House Within a House by Nicholas Dawson, reviewed by Katia Grubisic — Vallum