The Vancouver Writers Fest is pleased to announce Cherie Dimaline as our first annual Guest Curator, programming four events throughout festival week. A Métis writer, editor and coordinator of the annual Indigenous Writers’ Gathering, Dimaline’s fiction has been anthologized internationally. Her latest YA novel, The Marrow Thieves, won a 2017 Governor General’s Award, the American Kirkus Prize, and was shortlisted for numerous other awards. It was also a selection for CBC’s 2018 Canada Reads.

@cherie_dimaline

Sabrina Mahfouz is a British Egyptian playwright, poet and screenwriter. Her collection, How You Might Know Me, was a 2017 Guardian Best Summer Read. She is also the editor of The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write, a 2017 Guardian Book of the Year and currently nominated for The People’s Book Prize. Mahfouz was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is the recipient of the 2018 King’s Alumni Arts & Culture Award for inspiring change in the industry.

sabrinamahfouz.com, @SabrinaMahfouz

Sabrina Mahfouz is presented in partnership with British Council & Festival America.

Eden Robinson is a Haisla/Heiltsuk author who grew up in Haisla, British Columbia. Monkey Beach, her first novel, was shortlisted for both the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction in 2000 and won the BC Book Prize’s Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her novel, Son of a Trickster, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her latest work is Trickster Drift.

Vivek Shraya is an artist whose body of work includes several albums, films and books. Her first book of poetry, even this page is white, won a 2017 Publisher Triangle Award and was longlisted for CBC’s Canada Reads. A four-time Lambda Literary Award finalist, she has received honours from the Toronto Arts Foundation and The Writers’ Trust of Canada. She is the founder of the publishing imprint VS. Books and an Assistant Professor at University of Calgary.

vivekshraya.com, @vivekshraya