Jane Urquhart, LL.D is a Canadian novelist and poet. She is the internationally acclaimed author of seven award-winning novels, three books of poetry and numerous short stories. As a novelist, Urquhart is well known for her evocative style which blends history with the present day. Her first novel, The Whirlpool, gained her international recognition when she became the first Canadian to win France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger. Her subsequent novels were even more successful. Away, published in 1993, won the Trillium Award and was a national bestseller. In 1997, her fourth novel, The Underpainter, won the Governor General's Literary Award.
Philip Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, fiction writer and essayist.
Rohinton Mistry is an Indian-born Canadian writer. He has been the recipient of many awards including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2012. Each of his first three novels was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His novels to date have been set in India, told from the perspective of Parsis, and explore themes of family life, poverty, discrimination, and the corrupting influence of society.
Carol Ann Shields was an American-born Canadian novelist and short story writer. She is best known for her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award in Canada.
Chrétien de Troyes was a French poet and trouvère known for his writing on Arthurian subjects such as Gawain, Lancelot, Perceval and the Holy Grail. Chrétien's chivalric romances, including Erec and Enide, Lancelot, Perceval and Yvain, represent some of the best-regarded works of medieval literature. His use of structure, particularly in Yvain, has been seen as a step towards the modern novel.
Gregory Hollingshead, CM is a Canadian novelist. He was formerly a professor of English at the University of Alberta, and he lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Alice Ann Munro was a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Her work tends to move forward and backward in time, with integrated short story cycles.
Guy Clarence Vanderhaeghe is a Canadian novelist and short story writer, best known for his Western novel trilogy, The Englishman's Boy, The Last Crossing, and A Good Man set in the 19th-century American and Canadian West. Vanderhaeghe has won three Governor General's Awards for his fiction, one for his short story collection Man Descending in 1982, the second for his novel The Englishman's Boy in 1996, and the third for his short story collection Daddy Lenin and Other Stories in 2015.
André Alexis is a Canadian writer who was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, grew up in Ottawa, and now lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has received numerous awards including the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, the Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Trillium Award.
Susan Swan is a Canadian author, journalist, and professor. Susan Swan writes classic Canadian novels. Her fiction has been published in 20 countries and translated into 10 languages. She is the co-founder of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction which is open to Canadian and American women fiction writers and received an Order of Canada in 2023 for her mentoring of younger women writers.
Marcel Trudel was a Canadian historian, university professor (1947–1982) and author who published more than 40 books on the history of New France. He brought academic rigour to an area that had been marked by nationalistic and religious biases. His work was part of the marked changes to Quebec society during the Quiet Revolution. Trudel's work has been honoured with major awards, including the Governor General's Literary Award for French Non-Fiction in 1966, and a second nomination for the award in 1987.
Roger Sherman Loomis (1887–1966) was an American scholar and one of the foremost authorities on medieval and Arthurian literature. Loomis is perhaps best known for showing the roots of Arthurian legend, in particular the Holy Grail, in native Celtic mythology.
Donald Harman Akenson is an American historian and author. He is a fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Historical Society (UK). He is a Molson Prize Laureate, awarded for a lifetime contribution to Canadian culture. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984, and in 1992 he won the Grawemeyer Award. Akenson received his B.A. from Yale University and his doctorate from Harvard University. He is Distinguished University Professor and Douglas Professor of History at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and was simultaneously Beamish Research Professor at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool (2006–10), and senior editor of the McGill-Queen's University Press (1982-2012).
Elizabeth Grace Hay is a Canadian novelist and short story writer.
David Gilmour is a Canadian fiction novelist, former television journalist, film critic, and former professor at the University of Toronto.
Charles William Foran is a Canadian writer in Toronto, Ontario.
Cyril Dabydeen is a Guyana-born Canadian writer of Indian descent. He grew up in Rose Hall sugar plantation with the sense of Indian indenture rooted in his family background. He is a cousin of the UK writer David Dabydeen.
John Richard English is a Canadian academic and former politician.
Sandra Djwa is a Canadian writer, critic and cultural biographer. Originally from Newfoundland, she moved to British Columbia where she obtained her PhD from the University of British Columbia in 1968. In 1999, she was honored to deliver the Garnett Sedgewick Memorial Lecture in honor of the department's 80th anniversary. She taught Canadian literature in the English department at Simon Fraser University from 1968 to 2005 when she retired as J.S. Woodsworth Resident Scholar, Humanities. She was part of a seventies movement to establish the study of Canadian literature and, in 1973, cofounded the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures (ACQL). She was Chair of the inaugural meeting of ACQL. She initiated textual studies of the poems of E. J. Pratt in the eighties, was editor of Poetry, "Letters in Canada" for the University of Toronto Quarterly (1980-4), and Chair of Canadian Heads and Chairs of English (1989).
Ron Graham is a Canadian author and journalist.
