Cherie Dimaline

Winner of the 2025 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Cherie Dimaline is a member of the Georgian Bay Métis Community in Ontario. Her 2017 book, The Marrow Thieves, was named by Time magazine one of the Best YA Books of All Time, won the Governor General’s Award and the prestigious Kirkus Prize for Young Readers, and was the fan favorite for CBC’s 2018 Canada Reads. It was named a Book of the Year on numerous lists including National Public Radio, School Library Journal, the New York Public Library, Globe & Mail, Quill & Quire, and the CBC. It has been translated into several languages and continues to be a national bestseller.

Her next novel for adults, Empire of Wild (2019), became an instant Canadian bestseller and was named Indigo’s #1 Best Book of 2019. It is currently being adapted for an opera. Her follow-up YA novel, Hunting by Stars (2021), was named a 2022 American Indian Library Association Youth Literature Award Young Adult Honor Book. Dimaline received the prestigious Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award in 2021.

Dimaline published five books in 2023: VenCo, a delicious, witchy novel featuring an eclectic ensemble cast; An Anthology of Monsters, a nonfiction project about living with anxiety; Tiger Lily and the Secret Treasure of Neverland; Funeral Songs for Dying Girls, a YA novel exploring grief set in a cemetery; and Into the Bright Open, a reimagining of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. She also had a story, “Tick Talk,” published in Never Whistle at Night, an Indigenous dark fiction anthology, published in 2023.

She is working on new YA books, her next adult novel, and writing for film and TV projects.