Cherie Dimaline Wins NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature

World Literature Today, the University of Oklahoma’s award-winning magazine of international literature and culture, announced late Tuesday that Cherie Dimaline will be the next winner of the renowned NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature.

Awarded in alternating years with the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the NSK Prize recognizes outstanding literary merit in literature worldwide.

A member of the Georgian Bay Métis community in Canada, Dimaline resides in Toronto and has contributed to a variety of projects, including an anthology called Mitêwâcimowina: Indigenous Science Fiction and Speculative Storytelling (2016).

She has received numerous prestigious awards for her novels but is known best for her young-adult novel The Marrow Thieves (Cormorant Books, 2017), which explores the exploitation of Indigenous people. She is also widely known for her mentorship of deserving young writers, many of them Indigenous. She was nominated by the Syrian Canadian writer Danny Ramadan.

Robert Con Davis-Undiano, World Literature Today’s executive director, said that “it is a pleasure to see Cherie Dimaline receiving this recognition for her amazing writing career. Her inspired work will now reach an even larger reading community in the U.S. and around the world.”  

Acclaimed writers and artists serve on the NSK jury. Highly respected within the literary community for its recognition of excellence in children’s and young adult literature, this prize is among the most important in its field.  

Kathy Neustadt made the NSK Neustadt Prize announcement during the 2024 Neustadt Lit Fest on the University of Oklahoma Norman campus.