Deepa Rajagopalan is a Canadian writer, [1] whose short story collection Peacocks of Instagram was shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize. [2]
Born to Indian parents in Saudi Arabia, she has lived in India, the United States and Canada. [3] An MFA graduate of the University of Guelph, she won the PEN Canada New Voices Award in 2021 for the title story "Peacocks of Instagram". [3]
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.
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.
The Giller Prize is a literary award given to a Canadian author of a novel or short story collection published in English the previous year, after an annual juried competition between publishers who submit entries. The prize was established in 1994 by Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch in honour of his late wife Doris Giller, a former literary editor at the Toronto Star, and is awarded in November of each year along with a cash reward with the winner being presented by the previous year's winning author.
Bonnie Burnard was a Canadian short story writer and novelist, best known for her 1999 novel, A Good House, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
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.
Moyez G. Vassanji is a Canadian novelist and editor, who writes under the name M. G. Vassanji. Vassanji's work has been translated into several languages. As of 2020, he has published nine novels, as well as two short-fiction collections and two nonfiction books. Vassanji's writings, which have received considerable critical acclaim, often focus on issues of colonial history, migration, diaspora, citizenship, gender and ethnicity.
Anita Desai, is an Indian novelist and Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Literature. She won the Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea (1983). Her other works include The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight. She is on the advisory board of the Lalit Kala Akademi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London. Since 2020 she has been a Companion of Literature.
Shauna Singh Baldwin is a Canadian-American novelist of Indian descent.
Lisa Moore is a Canadian writer and editor established in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Lisa Rani Ray is a Canadian actress. She began her modelling career in India in the early 1990s, appearing for leading Indian brands like Bombay Dyeing and Lakmé. She made her acting debut in 1994 in the film Hanste Khelte. Through her acting career, Ray has demonstrated a penchant for issue-oriented portrayals, most notably in the 2005 Oscar-nominated Canadian film Water and the award-winning South African feature The World Unseen, described by a reviewer as "one of the best-conceived queer films of the past year."
Heather O'Neill is a Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer, screenwriter and journalist, who published her debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, in 2006. The novel was subsequently selected for the 2007 edition of Canada Reads, where it was championed by singer-songwriter John K. Samson. Lullabies won the competition. The book also won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for eight other major awards, including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Governor General's Award and was longlisted for International Dublin Literary Award.
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is a novel by M. G. Vassanji, published in 2003 by Doubleday Canada. The novel won the Scotiabank Giller Prize that year and narrates a story of Vikram Lall in the colonial and post-colonial Kenya. The title for the novel also inspired the title for Elizabeth Nunez's novel Anna In-Between, published in 2009.
Johanna Shively Skibsrud is a Canadian writer, whose debut novel The Sentimentalists won the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Souvankham Thammavongsa is a Laotian Canadian poet and short story writer. In 2019, she won an O. Henry Award for her short story, "Slingshot", which was published in Harper's Magazine, and in 2020 her short story collection How to Pronounce Knife won the Giller Prize.
Casey Plett is a Canadian writer, best known for her novel Little Fish, her Lambda Literary Award winning short story collection, A Safe Girl to Love, and her Giller Prize-nominated short story collection, A Dream of a Woman. Plett is a transgender woman, and she often centers this experience in her writing.
Michelle Good is a Cree writer, poet, and lawyer from Canada, most noted for her debut novel Five Little Indians. She is a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. Good has an MFA and a law degree from the University of British Columbia and, as a lawyer, advocated for residential-school survivors.
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is a novel by Deepa Anappara, published in 2020. Her debut novel, it received wide praise and won the Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize in 2019. Djinn Patrol is shortlisted for the 2020 JCB Prize and was longlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. The novel won the 2021 Edgar Award for Best Novel.
Megha Rajagopalan is an American journalist of Indian descent who works at The New York Times. She won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting at BuzzFeed News "for a series of clear and compelling stories that used satellite imagery and architectural expertise, as well as interviews with two dozen former prisoners, to identify a vast new infrastructure built by the Chinese government for the mass detention of Muslims" (Uighurs).
Kiawenti:io Tarbell, known mononymously as Kiawentiio, is a First Nations actress and singer. She made her television debut in the third season of the CBC series Anne with an E (2019) and her film debut in Beans (2020). She currently stars as Katara in the Netflix live-action remake of Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024).