Cherie Dimaline

Cherie Dimaline is the author of four YA novels. The Marrow Thieves won the Burt Award for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Literature, a Governor General’s Literary Award, the Kirkus Prize in Young Readers’ Literature, and was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award. Its follow-up, Hunting By Stars, was a 2022 American Indian Library Association Honor Book. Funeral Songs for Dying Girls was a 2023 Indigo Best Teen Book of the Year and Dimaline’s new novel, VENCO, debuted at #1 on Canadian bestseller lists. Her adult novel Empire of Wild was named a 2019 Indigo Best Book and is being adapted into an opera. Other titles include Anthology of Monsters: How Story Saves Us from Our Anxiety and Into the Bright Open. From the Georgian Bay Métis Community, Dimaline lives in Midland, Ontario.

Writers & Books

Award History

2026 - Winner

Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People

Jury Citation

“Cherie Dimaline’s writing for young people wears its heart on its sleeve and that heart is passionate, angry, risk-taking, raw, and vulnerable. In genre-bending fiction, she infuses contemporary urban realism, literary folktale, dystopia, magic, and the classic survival story with a highly original Indigenous voice. Race and the history of colonialism are baked into every plot turn, every character, every metaphor. In nuanced sentences that are rich with surprises in language and insight, the reader is invited into a world where the universal concerns of adolescence, identity and love, play out in tandem with deeply limned narratives of the natural world, its cycles, dramas, and fragility. Cherie Dimaline is a consummate, courageous wordsmith and storyteller at the top of her game.”—2026 Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People (Sarah Ellis, Marthe Jocelyn, Lindsay Wong)

2021 - Winner

Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award

Jury Citation

“Cherie Dimaline is a fearless and transformative storyteller,” said the jury. “Her devotion to craft and character manifests prose, both rich and earthy, that transcends genre and threads together Indigenous heritage with historical and contemporary realities… Dimaline continues to forge a fresh pathway into the landscape of Canadian literature.” — 2021 Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award Jury (David A. Robertson, Kerri Sakamoto, and Russell Wangersky)