Cherie Dimaline

Cherie Dimaline was raised in the Georgian Bay Métis Community of Ontario, where her family has strong genealogical connections to Indigenous people and European settlers. Dimaline’s maternal grandmother played a significant role in her upbringing, sharing stories that traced back to their Indigenous lineage and inspiring her granddaughter to become a writer. Dimaline has spent her adult life working in and for the Indigenous community, serving in various roles including director of a women’s center and museum curator. Dimaline’s first novel, Red Rooms (2007), won the award for Fiction Book of the Year at the Anskohk Aboriginal Literature Festival. Since then, she has written several novels including her popular young-adult dystopian novel The Marrow Thieves (2017), which won the Kirkus Award for young adult literature, and its sequel Hunting by Stars (2021). Dimaline has also contributed to various anthologies including Mitêwâcimowina: Indigenous Science Fiction and Speculative Storytelling (2016) and An Anthology of Monsters: How Story Saves Us from Our Anxiety (2023). She is the founding editor of Muskrat Magazine, an online publication centering Indigenous voices. In 2014, Dimaline was named Ontario’s Emerging Artist of the Year, and in 2015 she became the Toronto Library’s first Indigenous writer-in-residence. Though her Indigenous identity and community are central to her work, Dimaline is adamant that she cannot and does not speak for all Indigenous people. She lives in Toronto and is a member of the Georgian Bay Métis Council.