Diane Schoemperlen
Born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Diane Schoemperlen is the author of 14 books, including 9 short story collections, 3 novels, and 2 books of literary non-fiction. Her collection Forms of Devotion: Stories and Pictures was the winner of the 1998 Governor General’s Award for English Fiction. In 2007, she received the Marian Engel Award from The Writers’ Trust of Canada, given to an exemplary female writer in mid-career. In 2012, she was Writer-in-Residence at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where she has lived since 1986. In 2016, her book This Is Not My Life, Prison, and Other Complications was longlisted for the BC National Book Award, shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize, and appeared on numerous “Best Books of the Year” lists. A Toronto Star review of her 2017 collection First Things First: Early and Uncollected Stories named her “one of our most interesting and iconoclastic writers”. In 2017, Diane was the recipient of the Matt Cohen Award: In Celebration of a Writing Life from the Writers’ Trust of Canada. In 2018, she was awarded the Molson Prize in Arts by the Canada Council for the Arts “in recognition of exceptional achievement and outstanding contribution to the cultural and intellectual heritage of Canada”.
