Ian Williams
Ian Williams is the author of Personals, shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award; Not Anyone’s Anything, winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada; and You Know Who You Are, a finalist for the ReLit Prize for poetry. He was named as one of ten Canadian writers to watch by CBC.
Williams completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto and works as an English professor.
In 2014-2015, Williams was the Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the Calgary Distinguished Writers Program at the University of Calgary. He has also held residencies or fellowships at the Leighton Artists’ Colony at the Banff Centre, Vermont Studio Center, Cave Canem, Ki
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Katie Kitamura
Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel is Intimacies. One of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021, it was longlisted for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. It was also one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2021. In France, it won the Prix Litteraire Lucien Barriere, was a finalist for the Grand Prix de l’Heroine, and was nominated for the Prix Fragonard. Her previous novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book.
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Her work has been translated into over 20 languages and is being adapted for film and television. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature as well as fellowships from the Lannan, Jan Michalski and Santa M -
Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith is the author of Wade in the Water; Life on Mars, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award; and The Body’s Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is also the editor of an anthology, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, and the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, Smith served as Poet Laureate of the United States. She teaches at Princeton University.
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Mark Carney
Mark Joseph Carney is a Canadian politician and economist who is serving as the 24th prime minister of Canada and the leader of the Liberal Party since 2025. He has also been the member of Parliament (MP) for Nepean since 2025.
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Carney was born in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, and raised in Edmonton, Alberta. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University in 1987, then studied at the University of Oxford, where he earned a master’s degree in 1993 and a doctorate in 1995. He held various roles at Goldman Sachs before joining the Bank of Canada as a deputy governor in 2003. In 2004, he was named as senior associate deputy minister for the Department of Finance Canada. Carney served as the eighth governor of the -
Anne Michaels
Anne Michaels (born 15 April 1958) is a Canadian poet and novelist whose work has been translated and published in over 45 countries. Her books have garnered dozens of international awards including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. She is the recipient of honorary degrees, the Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Michaels won a 2019 Vine Award for Infinite Gradation, her first volume of non-fiction. Michaels was the poet laureate of Toronto, Ontario, C
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Jamie Chai Yun Liew
Jamie Chai Yun Liew is the recipient of the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop. She is a lawyer and law professor specializing in immigration, refugee, and citizenship law and the creator of the podcast Migration Conversations. Dandelion is her first novel. She lives in Ottawa with her family.
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Junie Désil
Junie Désil is of Haitian ancestry. Her work has appeared in Room Magazine, PRISM International, the Capilano Review, and CV2. Her first book, eat salt | gaze at the ocean, received wide acclaim.
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Maria Reva
MARIA REVA was born in Ukraine and grew up in Canada. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney's, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere, and has won a National Magazine Award. She also works as an opera librettist.
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Samantha M. Bailey
Samantha M. Bailey is the USA TODAY and #1 international bestselling author of WOMAN ON THE EDGE, optioned for series adaptation, WATCH OUT FOR HER, shortlisted for Canada Reads 2025, and A FRIEND IN THE DARK, an Amazon Charts bestseller. Her novels have sold in twelve countries. She lives in Toronto, where she can usually be found tapping away at her computer or curled up on her couch with a book. Samantha's next domestic suspense, HELLO, JULIET, will be published in April 2025.
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Wayne Ng
Wayne Ng was born in Anishinaabe land in what is commonly known as downtown Toronto to Chinese immigrants who fed him a steady diet of bitter melon and kung fu movies. Ng is a social worker who lives to write, travel, eat, and play, preferably all at the same time.
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He is an award-winning author and traveller who continues to push his boundaries from the Arctic to the Antarctic. He lives in Ottawa with his wife and goldfish.
Ng is the author of LETTERS FROM JOHNNY (winner of the Crime Writers of Canada Award for Best Crime Novella and Ottawa Book Award finalist); JOHNNY DELIVERS (recommended by The Globe and Mail and CBC Books); and THE FAMILY CODE (Ottawa Book Award and Guernica Prize finalist).
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Catherine Hernandez
Catherine Hernandez (she/her) is an award-winning author and screenwriter. She is a proud queer woman who is of Filipino, Spanish, Chinese and Indian descent and married into the Navajo Nation. Her first novel, Scarborough, won the Jim Wong-Chu Award for the unpublished manuscript; was a finalist for the Toronto Book Awards, the Evergreen Forest of Reading Award, the Edmund White Award, and the Trillium Book Award; and was longlisted for Canada Reads. She has written the critically acclaimed plays Singkil, The Femme Playlist and Eating with Lola and the children’s books M Is for Mustache: A Pride ABC Book and I Promise. She recently wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Scarborough, which is currently in post-production by Compy F
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Joshua Whitehead
Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit storyteller and academic from Peguis First Nation on Treaty 1 territory in Manitoba. He is currently working toward a Ph.D. in Indigenous literatures and cultures at the University of Calgary on Treaty 7 territory. His most recent book of poetry, Full-Metal Indigiqueer, was shortlisted for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. In 2016, his poem “mihkokwaniy” won Canada’s History Award for Aboriginal Arts and Stories (for writers aged 19–29), which included a residency at the Banff Centre. He has been published widely in Canadian literary magazines such as Prairie Fire, EVENT, Arc Poetry Magazine, CV2, Red Rising Magazine, and Geez Magazine’s Decolonization issue.
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Ma-Nee Chacaby
As a child, Chacaby learned spiritual and cultural traditions from her Cree grandmother and trapping, hunting, and bush survival skills from her Ojibwa stepfather. She also suffered physical and sexual abuse by different adults, and by her teen years she was alcoholic herself. At twenty, Chacaby moved to Thunder Bay with her children to escape an abusive marriage. Abuse, compounded by racism, continued, but Chacaby found supports to help herself and others. Over the following decades, she achieved sobriety; trained and worked as an alcoholism counselor; raised her children and fostered many others; learned to live with visual impairment; and came out as a lesbian. In 2013, Chacaby led the first gay pride parade in her adopted city, Thunder
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Katherena Vermette
Katherena Vermette is a Canadian writer, who won the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry in 2013 for her collection North End Love Songs. Vermette is of Metis descent and from Winnipeg, Manitoba. She was a MFA student in creative writing at the University of British Columbia.
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Her children's picture book series The Seven Teachings Stories was published by Portage and Main Press in 2015. In addition to her own publications, her work has also been published in the literary anthology Manitowapow: Aboriginal Writings from the Land of Water. She is a member of the Aboriginal Writers Collective of Manitoba, and edited the anthology xxx ndn: love and lust in ndn country in 2011.
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David Alexander Robertson
DAVID A. ROBERTSON is a two-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award, has won the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, as well as the Writer's Union of Canada Freedom to Read award. He has received several other accolades for his work as a writer for children and adults, podcaster, public speaker, and social advocate. He was honoured with a Doctor of Letters by the University of Manitoba for outstanding contributions in the arts and distinguished achievements in 2023. He is a member of Norway House Cree Nation and lives in Winnipeg.
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Murray Sinclair
Calvin Murray Sinclair was a Canadian politician who was a member of the Senate, and a First Nations lawyer who served as chairman of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 2009 to 2015.
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Sinclair previously served as Manitoba's first Indigenous judge from 1988 to 2009, and was appointed to the Senate of Canada on April 2, 2016. In November 2020, he announced his retirement from the Senate effective January 31, 2021.
Queen's University announced the appointment of Sinclair as the 15th chancellor, succeeding Jim Leech. He assumed the role on July 1, 2021. He declined to seek reappointment, with his term expiring on June 30, 2024. Instead, he accepted a new role as the Chancellor Emeritus and Special Advisor to -
Ethel Wilson
Ethel Davis Wilson was a Canadian writer of short stories and novels.
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Born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, she moved to England in 1890 following the death of her mother. In 1898, after the death of her father, she was taken to live with her maternal grandmother in Vancouver, British Columbia. She received her teacher's certificate in 1907, and for thirteen years taught in Vancouver elementary schools.
In 1921 she married Wallace Wilson, President of the Canadian Medical Association and professor of medical ethics at the University of British Columbia.
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Carol Off
Carol Off is a Canadian television and radio journalist, associated with CBC Television and CBC Radio. She has been a host of CBC Radio's As It Happens since 2006. Previously a documentary reporter for The National, Off also hosted the political debate series counterSpin on CBC Newsworld.
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She is the vice-president of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. She was awarded ACTRA's John Drainie Award, for distinguished contributions to Canadian broadcasting, in 2008.
Off has also written several books on the Canadian military, including 'The Lion, the Fox, and the Eagle' (2000) and 'The Ghosts of Medak Pocket: the Story of Canada's Secret War' (2005, ISBN 0-679-31294-3). In 2006, she released a book, 'Bitter Chocolate,' about the corruption a -
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Madeleine Thien
Madeleine Thien was born in Vancouver. She is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001), and three novels, Certainty (2006); Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), shortlisted for Berlin’s International Literature Prize and winner of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 2015 Liberaturpreis; and Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), about musicians studying Western classical music at the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s, and about the legacy of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations. Her books and stories are published in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, and have been translated into 25 languages.
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Do Not Say We Have Nothing won the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2016 Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and an Edward Stanford Priz -
Marian Engel
Canadian novelist, short-story and children's fiction writer, Marian Engel was a passionate activist for the national and international writer’s cause.
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She was the first chair of the Writer’s Union of Canada (1973–74) and helped found the Public Lending Right Commission. From 1975-1977, she served on the City of Toronto Book Award Committee (an award she won in 1981 for Lunatic Villas) and the Canadian Book and Periodical Development Council.
In 1982 she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
She married Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) radio producer Howard Engel in 1962 and, upon their return to Toronto from England in 1964, began to raise a family--twins William Lucas Passmore and Charlotte Helen Arabella--and to pursue a writi -
Anne Fleming
Anne Fleming is the author of five books: Pool-Hopping and Other Stories , shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Danuta Gleed Award and the Governor General’s Award; the critically acclaimed novel, Anomaly ; Gay Dwarves of America , also shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson; poemw , a book of poems shortlisted for the BC Book Prizes’ Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; and The Goat , a novel for children. Her non-fiction has been published in a raft of anthologies, including Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, Great Expectations: Twenty-Four True Stories About Childbirth, and You Be Me .
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Anne grew up in Toronto and lived in Kitchener, Ontario for a chunk of time before moving to Vancouver, where she received her MFA -
Hiromi Goto
Hiromi’s first novel, Chorus of Mushrooms (1994), received the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in the Caribbean and Canada region and was co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award. Her short stories and poetry have been widely published in literary journals and anthologies. Her second novel, The Kappa Child (2001), was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Regional Book, and was awarded the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award. Her first children’s novel, The Water of Possibility, was also published that year. Hopeful Monsters, a collection of short stories, was released in 2004. Her YA/Crossover novel, Half World (2009), was long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and received the 2010 Sunburst Award an
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Jane Urquhart
She is the author of seven internationally acclaimed novels entitled, The Whirlpool, Changing Heaven, Away, The Underpainter, The Stone Carvers, A Map of Glass, and Sanctuary Line.
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The Whirlpool received the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Award). Away was winner of the Trillium Book Award and a finalist for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The Underpainter won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction and was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
The Stone Carvers was a finalist for the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. A Map of Glass was a finalist for a regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Bo -
Wayne Johnston
Wayne Johnston was born and raised in Goulds, Newfoundland. After a brief stint in pre-Med, Wayne obtained a BA in English from Memorial University. He worked as a reporter for the St. John's Daily News before deciding to devote himself full-time to writing.
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En route to being published, Wayne earned an MA in Creative Writing from the University of New Brunswick. Then he got off to a quick start. His first book, The Story of Bobby O'Malley, published when he was 27 years old, won the WH Smith/Books in Canada First Novel award for the best first novel published in the English language in Canada in that year. The Divine Ryans was adapted to a film, for which Wayne wrote the screenplay. Baltimore's Mansion, a memoire dealing with his grandfather -
Tomson Highway
In the six decades since he was born in a tent in the bush of northernmost Manitoba, Tomson Highway has traveled many paths and been called by many names. Residential school survivor, classical pianist, social worker and, since the 1980s, playwright, librettist, novelist and children's author.
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He is fluent in French, English and his native Cree. In 1994 he was invested as a Member of the Order of Canada -- the first Aboriginal writer to receive that honour. In 2000, Maclean's magazine named him one of the 100 most important people in Canadian history.
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Toni Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
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Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. Morrison earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor for fiction a -
Zoe Whittall
Zoe Whittall's latest novel, The Best Kind of People, spent 26 consecutive weeks on the Globe bestseller list, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, was Indigo Best Book of the Year, Heather's Pick, Globe and Mail Best Book, Toronto Life Best Book of 2016, Walrus Magazine Best Book of 2016 . The film/TV rights have been optioned by Sarah Polley who will write and direct. She has two previous novels and three collections of poetry, and has written for the televisions shows Degrassi, Schitt's Creek, and The Baroness Von Sketch Show. She won the KM Hunter award for literature, and a Lamda Literary award for her second novel, Holding Still for as Long as Possible. Her debut, Bottle Rocket Hearts, was named one of the top ten novels of the deca
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Wayne Ng
Wayne Ng was born in Anishinaabe land in what is commonly known as downtown Toronto to Chinese immigrants who fed him a steady diet of bitter melon and kung fu movies. Ng is a social worker who lives to write, travel, eat, and play, preferably all at the same time.
Buy books on Amazon
He is an award-winning author and traveller who continues to push his boundaries from the Arctic to the Antarctic. He lives in Ottawa with his wife and goldfish.
Ng is the author of LETTERS FROM JOHNNY (winner of the Crime Writers of Canada Award for Best Crime Novella and Ottawa Book Award finalist); JOHNNY DELIVERS (recommended by The Globe and Mail and CBC Books); and THE FAMILY CODE (Ottawa Book Award and Guernica Prize finalist).
Connect with Ng on social media and at wayneng -
Hiromi Goto
Hiromi’s first novel, Chorus of Mushrooms (1994), received the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in the Caribbean and Canada region and was co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award. Her short stories and poetry have been widely published in literary journals and anthologies. Her second novel, The Kappa Child (2001), was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Regional Book, and was awarded the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award. Her first children’s novel, The Water of Possibility, was also published that year. Hopeful Monsters, a collection of short stories, was released in 2004. Her YA/Crossover novel, Half World (2009), was long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and received the 2010 Sunburst Award an
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Emma Healey
Emma^^Healey
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EMMA HEALEY’s first book of poems, Begin with the End in Mind, was published by ARP Books in 2012. Her poems and essays have been featured in places like the Los Angeles Review of Books, the FADER, the Hairpin, Real Life, the National Post, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Walrus, Toronto Life, and Canadian Art. She was poetry critic at the Globe and Mail (2014–2016) and is a regular contributor to the music blog Said the Gramophone. She was the recipient of the Irving Layton Award for Creative Writing in both 2010 and 2013, a National Magazine Award nominee in 2015, and a finalist for the K.M. Hunter award in 2016. -
Ethel Wilson
Ethel Davis Wilson was a Canadian writer of short stories and novels.
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Born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, she moved to England in 1890 following the death of her mother. In 1898, after the death of her father, she was taken to live with her maternal grandmother in Vancouver, British Columbia. She received her teacher's certificate in 1907, and for thirteen years taught in Vancouver elementary schools.
In 1921 she married Wallace Wilson, President of the Canadian Medical Association and professor of medical ethics at the University of British Columbia.
Wilson is well known as one of the first Canadian writers to truly capture the beauty of British Colombia. She wrote often of places in BC that were important to her and was able to detail the -
Junie Désil
Junie Désil is of Haitian ancestry. Her work has appeared in Room Magazine, PRISM International, the Capilano Review, and CV2. Her first book, eat salt | gaze at the ocean, received wide acclaim.
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Bindu Suresh
A former journalist and current paediatrician, Bindu Suresh is the author of short stories that have appeared in various literary publications. She studied literature at Columbia University and medicine at McGill University. Born in Wales, she grew up in Canada and has spent equal parts of her life in Saskatchewan, Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec. She currently lives in Montreal.
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