Diane Schoemperlen
Born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Diane Schoemperlen is the author of fourteen books
and winner of the 1998 Governor General’s Award for English Fiction for Forms of Devotion:
Stories and Pictures. 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-inResidence at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where she has lived since 1986. She has
been a mentor with the Humber School for Writers Graduate Certificate Program since 2015.
Since publishing her first book, Double Exposures, in 1984, Diane has been heralded as a writer
of extraordinary imagination and innovation. Her 1990 collection, The Man of My Dreams, was
shortlisted for both the Governor-General’s Award and the Trillium Book Award. In the
Language of Love and Forms of Devotion have both been adapted as stage plays and performed
in Kingston and at the Fringe Festival in Toronto. Her 2014 publication, By the Book: Stories
and Pictures, a collection of stories drawn from old textbooks and illustrated with her own fullcolour collages, was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her
2016 book, This Is Not My Life: A Memoir of Love, 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 including the Globe & Mail, the National Post, The
Hill Times, and the CBC. 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.” Her books have been published in several countries including the United States, the
UK, Germany, Sweden, France, Spain, Korea, and China.
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.”