Cherie Dimaline

Cherie Dimaline is a writer and a member of the Georgian Bay Métis Council of the Métis Nation of Ontario. She is most notable for her 2017 young adult novel The Marrow Thieves, which explores the continued colonial exploitation of Indigenous peoples.

Dimaline won the award for Fiction Book of the Year at the Anskohk Aboriginal Literature Festival for her first novel, Red Rooms. She has since published the short story Seven Gifts for Cedar, the novel The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy, and the short story collection A Gentle Habit. She was the 2019 editor of Little Bird Stories (Volume IX), published by Invisible Publishing and featuring winners of the annual Little Bird Writing Contest run by the Sarah Selecky Writing School.

She was the founding editor of Muskrat Magazine, was named the Emerging Artist of the Year at the Ontario Premier's Awards for Excellence in Arts in 2014, and became the first Indigenous writer-in-residence for the Toronto Public Library.

Biography Dimaline was originally a resident of a Métis community in the Georgian Bay area. She now resides in the city of Toronto. Her childhood summers were spent back in her Métis community. During her time spent back home, Dimaline learned stories from her family that she then passed onto her cousins. Dimaline was also a columnist and editor for Chatelaine in the early 2000s.

Dimaline considers herself a Métis or Indigenous writer, not a Canadian writer, saying "I would love to be recognized as a writer of Indigenous stories. I'm not a Canadian writer. This is what is now known as Canada; it means something different to and for me."

Community involvement Dimaline has participated in numerous literary festivals, including Kingston WritersFest (2016), Toronto International Festival of Authors (2016, 2018, 2019), Wordfest Imaginairium (2019, 2023), and Vancouver Writers Fest (2020, 2021, 2023).