Cherie Dimaline

Cherie Dimaline comes from the Georgian Bay Métis Community in Ontario and has written about Métis life since her first collection, Red Rooms, in 2007. The Marrow Thieves, published in 2017, carried furthest: a future in which most people have lost the ability to dream and Indigenous people, who have not, are hunted for the marrow in their bones, with residential schools rebuilt to extract it. It took the Governor General's Award for young people's literature and the Kirkus Prize. Funeral Songs for Dying Girls, from 2023, is quieter and set now: sixteen-year-old Winifred lives with her father in a cemetery caretaker's house in Toronto, invents a ghost to keep the crematorium from closing, and finds she has company she did not invent. Empire of Wild and VenCo are also hers.