Kaie Kellough

Kaie Kellough (born 1975) is a Canadian poet and novelist. He was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, raised in Calgary, Alberta, and in 1998 moved to Montreal, Quebec, where he lives.

Writing

Kellough has published three books of poetry, two audio recordings, one novel, and one collection of short stories. He is also a practitioner of vocal sound poetry. His work multiplies and layers voice, while exploring the fundamentals of language-production.

His experimental debut novel, Accordéon, takes the form of a transcript of someone being interrogated by three agents from a Ministry of Culture, and was a shortlisted nominee for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. The novel was inspired by the conflict over the proposed Quebec Charter of Values. Writing for the Montreal Review of Books, Sara Spike calls it "a remarkable work of experimental fiction that pushes back against those who would forward a singular narrative of this unabashedly contradictory city, celebrating instead the messy multiplicity of Montreal."

Having mostly abandoned written poems in favor of sound work, Kellough only began to draw together the poems that would become Magnetic Equator after an encounter with Dionne Brand at a literary festival in 2017.