Library and Archives Canada Scholar Awards

Originally from Charlevoix, Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay has been living in Montréal (Tiohtià:ke) for nearly 10 years. Her work explores autofiction, mental health and transgender identity.

Her outstanding performance in the acclaimed film Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves earned her a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress—a first for a trans woman.

An author, actress, human rights advocate (particularly for trans people, serving as co spokesperson for Interligne, an organization supporting 2SLGBTQIA+ communities), screenwriter, model, and speaker, she has contributed numerous texts to literary journals and anthologies, and was also a columnist for Le Devoir.

She is the author of the books Les secrets de l’origami and La voix de la nature, and the novel Dandelion Daughter (Prix des libraires 2022, nominated for the Dublin Literary Award). A true critical and popular success, Dandelion Daughter—translated into English and Spanish and distributed in Europe—quickly became a landmark work in advancing the conversation on transgender identity in the mainstream. The highly anticipated sequel to this Quebec bestseller, La fille de la foudre, will be released this fall.

Rupi Kaur is a world-renowned poet, artist, and four-time best-selling author. Her collections have sold over 12 million copies and been translated into over 40 languages. Her debut book, milk and honey, remains one of the best-selling poetry collections of the 21st century.

In 2021, Kaur made history with Rupi Kaur Live, the first poetry special of its kind to premiere on Amazon Prime Video. Kaur also served as executive producer on the film This Place, which debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022, and on To Kill a Tiger, the acclaimed documentary nominated for an Academy Award in 2024.

Tomson Highway was born in a snowbank on the Manitoba–Nunavut border to a family of nomadic caribou hunters. Raised off reserve in the breathtaking landscape of Canada’s Subarctic, he had the great privilege of growing up in two Indigenous languages—Cree, his mother tongue, and Dene, the language of the neighbouring nation—a people with whom his family roamed and hunted.

After earning a Bachelor of Music and the equivalent of a Bachelor of Arts with a major in English, he worked for seven years in the field of Indigenous social work. Drawing on his education and training, he then devoted himself to writing.

Today, Tomson is celebrated internationally as a playwright, novelist, pianist and songwriter. His acclaimed works include The Rez Sisters, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Rose, Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout, The (Post) Mistress, and the bestselling novel Kiss of the Fur Queen and recently published memoir Permanent Astonishment. He has also written children’s books, such as Caribou Song, Dragonfly Kites, and Fox on the Ice. His work has been translated into 11 languages.

For many years, Tomson served as Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto, Canada’s premier Indigenous theatre company, which has nurtured and launched an entire generation of playwrights and theatre artists.

Tomson is the recipient of 11 honorary doctorates and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. His accolades include Dora Mavor Moore Awards, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award, the Toronto Arts Award, the National Aboriginal Achievement Award, and the 2022 Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award at the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards. The (Post) Mistress was also nominated for a 2015 Juno Award for Best Aboriginal Recording of the Year, and in 2022, he released his first album of country songs, Cree Country—Tomson Highway.

In 2021, Tomson received the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction for his memoir Permanent Astonishment. The following year, he delivered the CBC Massey Lectures to audiences across Canada in the series’ first live event since 2019.

Fluent in Cree, French and English, Tomson continues to write, teach, lecture and perform across Canada and around the world.

Margaret MacMillan (Toronto and Oxford) is an emeritus professor of History at the University of Toronto and an emeritus professor of International History at Oxford University. She served as Provost of Trinity College, Toronto (2002–2007) and as Warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford (2007–2017). She is currently a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Imperial War Museum (London), and the Institute of Human Sciences (Vienna).

Her research specializes in British imperial history and the international history of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her latest book is War: How Conflict Shaped Us, and her other publications include Paris, 1919, and The War that Ended Peace. She delivered the CBC Massey Lectures in 2015 and the BBC Reith Lectures in 2018. Among her many honours are the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and the Governor General’s Literary Award. She holds honorary degrees from several universities and is an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy, a Companion of the Order of Canada, a Companion of Honour (UK), and a Member of the Order of Merit. She is also a frequent contributor to and commentator in the media, both in Canada and internationally.

Danny Ramadan is a Syrian-Canadian author and a passionate advocate for LGBTQ+ refugees. His memoir, Crooked Teeth (2024), received widespread acclaim and was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction.

His latest novel, The Foghorn Echoes, won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction and earned nominations for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes and the City of Vancouver Book Award. His debut novel, The Clothesline Swing, won the Independent Publisher Book Award, was longlisted for Canada Reads, and has been translated into multiple languages. Ramadan is also the author of the award-winning Salma children’s series, which received the Nautilus Book Award, the Publishing Triangle Award, the Middle East Book Award, among numerous other accolades.

Since arriving in Canada, Ramadan has raised over $300,000 to support LGBTQ+ refugees, securing safe passage for more than two dozen queer and trans individuals. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Adler University.

He lives in Vancouver with his husband and two dogs. When he’s not writing, you’ll likely find him immersed in a video game.

Reneltta Arluk is Inuvialuk, Dene, and Cree from the Northwest Territories. Raised by her grandparents on the trapline until school-age, Reneltta’s early nomadic life provided her with the unique skills needed to become the multi-disciplined nomadic performing artist she is today. Through this lived experience and artistic training, Reneltta has acquired the specialized cultural protocol awarenesses and artistic Indigenous lens in which she works from.

As the Director of Indigenous Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Reneltta was responsible for the vision to design Indigenous-led Arts programming across all artistic disciplines and to offer support for inclusionary programming for Indigenous artists campus-wide. She was also responsible for developing and strengthening relationships with Treaty 6 Indigenous community members, and forging partnerships with non-Indigenous artistic institutions regionally, nationally and globally, all with the intention of creating space for Indigenous voices.

Reneltta holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting from the University of Alberta, where she became the first Indigenous woman and first Inuk to graduate from the reputable program. For over 20 years, Reneltta has been part of or initiated the creation of Indigenous theatre across Canada and overseas. In 2008, she founded Akpik Theatre, the only professional Indigenous theatre company in the Northwest Territories. Adhering to its namesake, the cloudberry, Akpik Theatre strives to flourish in the northern climate it reflects by developing, mentoring and producing performance-based work that is northern-Indigenous inspired and created. Reneltta is also the first Inuk and Indigenous woman to direct at the Stratford Festival, where she received the Festival’s 2017 Tyrone Guthrie—Derek F. Mitchell Artistic Director's Award for directing The Breathing Hole by playwright Colleen Murphy.

Reneltta advocates for cultural change in Canada as an artist, board member and arts administrator. She extends that stewardship internationally as an arts leader utilizing inherent Indigenous value systems.

Kate Beaton was born and raised in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. After graduating from Mount Allison University with a double degree in History and Anthropology, she moved to Alberta in search of work that would allow her to pay down her student loans.

During the years she spent out in Western Canada, Beaton began creating webcomics under the name Hark! A Vagrant, quickly drawing a substantial following around the world. The collections of her landmark strips Hark! A Vagrant and Step Aside, Pops each spent several months on the New York Times graphic novel bestseller list, as well as appeared on best-of-the-year lists from Time, The Washington Post, Vulture, NPR Books, and winning the Eisner, Ignatz, Harvey, and Doug Wright awards. She has also published the picture books King Baby and The Princess and the Pony.

Her most recent book is the award-winning memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, which was named a New York Times Notable Book, a Canada Reads Selection, and one of Barack Obama’s favourite books of the year.

Beaton lives in Cape Breton with her family.

René Homier-Roy was born in Montréal on April 5, 1940.

In 1958, he studied architecture at McGill University, then political science at the University of Ottawa and the Université de Montréal. In 1963, he began managing the arts and entertainment pages of Le Petit Journal, and in 1969, those of the daily newspaper La Presse.

In 1973, in collaboration with Varham G. Haroutioun and Paul Azaria, he launched Nous magazine, which had 100 000 copies published and which he managed until the end of the 80s. In 1976, after the departure of Lise Payette, he co-hosted the late-night program “Mesdames et Messieurs” on Radio-Canada television.

In 1982, he launched Ticket magazine, focusing on film, and the following year hosted “À première vue” with Chantal Jolis, a series of programs dedicated to film news on Radio-Canada television.

At the same time, he hosted several programs on CKAC radio and co-hosted “Montréal Matin” on CKVL with Pierre Bourgault.

In the years that followed, he contributed extensively to the magazines Châtelaine, l’Actualité, TV Hebdo and Sélection du Reader’s Digest.

From May 1998 until 2013, he hosted the Radio-Canada morning show “C’est bien meilleur le matin,” whose market shares grew from 7 to 21 over the years.

On television, he hosted “Viens voir les comédiens,” a series of wide-ranging interviews he conducted until 2012, which would later become “Viens voir les musiciens” on radio.

Since 2014, he has been hosting “Culture club” on Ici Radio-Canada Première, a magazine devoted to cultural news.

Rohinton Mistry, novelist and short-story writer, was born in Bombay and came to Canada in 1975 after completing a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Economics at St. Xavier’s College, Bombay University. For the next few years, he worked for a bank while taking evening courses in English literature and philosophy at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan), York University, and the University of Toronto.

He started writing in 1983, and his first book, Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987), was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Its eleven linked stories, set during the 1960s and 1970s, trace the patterns of life in a run-down apartment block in Bombay.

Three novels followed; all were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In Such a Long Journey (1991), the backdrop is the 1971 conflict between India and Pakistan—the war that ended with the birth of Bangladesh. The novel won the Governor General’s Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, and the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award. It was made into an acclaimed feature film in 1998.

Rohinton Mistry’s second novel, A Fine Balance (1995), takes the reader to mid-1970s India, the time when a countrywide state of emergency was declared. The book won the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Winifred Holtby Award, and Denmark’s ALOA Prize. The novel was selected for Oprah’s Book Club, and in 2013, on the 20^th anniversary of the Giller Prize, it won the CBC Books’ Giller of All Gillers.

In his third novel, Family Matters (2002), the protagonist is a 79-year-old widower with Parkinson’s disease, negotiating domestic strife and the infirmities of old age. It won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize for Fiction and the Canadian Authors Association Fiction Award.

Rohinton Mistry has received honorary degrees from several universities, as well as the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation’s Fellows Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009, awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2012, and appointed to the Order of Canada in 2016. His work has been published in more than 35 languages.

Shani Mootoo was born in Ireland and raised in Trinidad, relocating to Canada in her early twenties. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Western Ontario (now Western University) in 1980, and a Master of Arts in English and Theatre from the University of Guelph in 2010. While she practiced initially as a video maker and visual artist, for the last 30 years Mootoo has concentrated on novel writing, poetry, and photo-based work.

Mootoo’s artworks have been exhibited internationally, including at the New York Museum of Modern Art and the Venice Biennale. Her first collection of short stories, Out on Main Street, was published in 1993, beginning her literary career. Her first novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, was published in 1996 and shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, as well as being longlisted for the Booker Prize. Today, it has been reissued as both a Penguin Modern Classic and a Vintage Classic.

The Predicament of Or, her first collection of poetry, was published in 2002. Other novels include He Drown She in the Sea, which was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, Valmiki’s Daughter, and Moving Forward Sideways like a Crab, both of which were longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Mootoo’s latest novel, Polar Vortex, was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Her second book of poetry, Cane|Fire, was published in 2022, and her third, Oh Witness Dey!, in 2024.

Mootoo has served as writer-in-residence at universities across the world and frequently reads and speaks internationally. She was awarded a Doctor of Letters honoris causa from Western University, is a recipient of Lambda Literary’s James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, and has been named a Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award Winner. The Writers’ Trust jury citation reads, in part, “With deep understanding and a fearless devotion, she worries at the knot of identity and transformation revealing, in an ever-expanding way, the cost of pursuing one’s dreams.”

Mootoo lives in Southern Ontario.