Library and Archives Canada Scholar Awards

Cameron Bailey is the Chief Executive Officer of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), the world’s largest public film festival and one of Canada’s leading cultural brands.

Born in London, Bailey grew up in England and Barbados before migrating to Canada. He began his career as a film critic before joining TIFF as a programmer, where he curated Canadian, African, and South Asian cinema.

Bailey has taught film curation at the University of Toronto and holds an honorary Doctor of Laws from Western University. He is a voting member of both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and is also a Chevalier in France’s Order of Arts and Letters. In April 2025, he was awarded the prestigious King Charles III Coronation Medal in recognition of his outstanding achievements and significant contributions to Canada. In 2026, he was appointed to the Order of Ontario and was also selected as a member of the inaugural cohort of the Michael D. Eisner Arts and Culture Fellowship at the Aspen Institute.

For 14 consecutive years (2012–2025), Toronto Life magazine has named him one of Toronto’s 50 Most Influential People.

Passionate about literature since childhood, Victoria Charlton taught herself to read at the age of four. A graduate of Université Laval with a degree in literary studies and holding a master's degree in Canadian studies from the University of Manitoba, she first taught French at the high school level in Mexico before fully dedicating herself to her career as a content creator.

Today, Victoria is one of the most influential figures in French-language true-crime documentaries. Since creating her YouTube channel in 2018, she has built a community of over 730,000 subscribers and generates more than 1.5 million monthly views with her podcasts about true crimes, disappearances, and mysteries.

A bestselling author, she has published the Gardez l’œil ouvert series, as well as several books, including Et tombent les têtes, La nuit de ta disparition and, more recently, Crimes sans frontières: Mystères et enquêtes sur deux continents (2026), co-written with McSkyz.

Victoria also hosted Évaporés: Victoria Charlton enquête and won the YouTuber of the Year award at the 2024 Influence Creation Gala.

Drew Hayden Taylor is an award-winning playwright, novelist, and filmmaker. Born and raised on Curve Lake First Nation, he has done everything from performing stand-up comedy at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., to serving as artistic director of Canada's premier Indigenous theatre company, Native Earth Performing Arts. This October will see the release of his fifth novel, Sucker Falls, published by McClelland & Stewart.

The recipient of three honorary doctorates, he considers it a great honour to travel the world and spread the gospel of Indigenous literature.

Robert Holmes “R.H.” Thomson has appeared in film and television and in theatres across Canada. He played Matthew Cuthbert in Anne with an E for CBC/Netflix and recently appeared at the Atlantic Theatre Company as Vladimir in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and Solness in The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen. His passion for mingling music and narrative has led to projects with Toronto's Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, the Toronto Bach Festival and orchestras in many parts of Canada.

An advocate for the arts, Thomson has also worked on many history/arts projects. He built The World Remembers/Le monde se souvient, a multi-nation First World War commemoration project that has displays at the Canadian War Museum, the National WWI Museum and Memorial in the United States and soon the Vimy Memorial in France. His book By the Ghost Light: Wars, Memory, and Families, an engaging exploration of how the stories we tell affect the wars we fight, was on the bestseller list for Canadian non-fiction. He is a Member of the Order of Canada and was awarded the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement.

Born in a displaced persons camp, Margie Wolfe came to Canada as an infant. As she grew older, she came to understand how her experience as an immigrant outsider shaped her publishing and writing choices. In her work, she consistently prioritizes women’s issues, histories, and biographies, with a strong commitment to amplifying voices from diverse communities, including Indigenous, LGBTQ, disabled, and refugee/immigrant writers. As a publisher she has focused on themes of inequities, abuse, race, and the Holocaust for both adult and youth audiences.

In 2020, Wolfe received the President's Award from the Association of Canadian Publishers, recognizing her publishing vision as a powerful force for change. She is known for seeking out authors and topics that bring new voices and histories to prominence. Her works have reached bestseller lists, influenced school curricula, and engaged new generations of readers.

Wolfe was honoured with the Order of Canada for her dedication as a leading publisher, feminist, and social justice advocate in Canada’s literary industry, recognizing her work in championing inclusive and diverse publications. She is currently Publisher Emerita at Second Story Press (SSP), which she co-founded in 1988 after eleven years at Women’s Press. SSP titles have been translated into more than 40 languages worldwide and used to support anti-hate education.

Margie Wolfe’s impact and contributions to Canadian publishing have helped build a vibrant and inclusive society while also being widely described as transformative.

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.