Tanya Talaga

Tanya Talaga is of Anishinaabe and Polish descent and was born and raised in Toronto. She is a member of Fort William First Nation. Her mother was raised on the traditional territory of Fort William First Nation and Treaty 9 . She is the acclaimed author of the national bestseller Seven Fallen Feathers, which won the RBC Taylor Prize, the Writers’ Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and the First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult Award. A finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the novel was also CBC’s Nonfiction Book of the Year and a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. Talaga was the 2017–2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy and the 2018 CBC Massey Lecturer. She is also the author of the national bestseller All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward. For more than 20 years she was a journalist at the Toronto Star and is now a regular columnist at the Globe and Mail. Tanya Talaga is the founder of Makwa Creative, a production company formed to elevate Indigenous voices and stories.

Instagram/Threads: @tanyatalaga_author

FESTIVAL SHOWS

The Way We… Wear

Starring Anne Enright, Holly Gramazio, Jenny Heijun Wills, Richard Kelly Kemick, Sarah Leavitt, Canisia Lubrin, Marissa Stapley & Tanya Talaga.
Hosted by Pam Rocker

Oct. 19 @ 7:30 PM $25
DJD Dance Centre

What a Pair!

Starring Canisia Lubrin & Tanya Talaga
Oct. 20 @ 1 PM $25
DJD Dance Centre

FESTIVAL BOOK

The Knowing 

For generations, Indigenous people have known that their family members disappeared, many of them after being sent to residential schools, “Indian hospitals”, and asylums through a coordinated system designed to destroy who the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people are. This is one of Canada’s greatest open secrets, an unhealed wound that until recently lay hidden by shame and abandonment.

The Knowing is the unfolding of Canadian history unlike anything we have ever read before. Award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells the history of this country as only she can—through an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter and her family as they experienced decades of government- and Church-sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide.

Deeply personal and meticulously researched, The Knowing is a seminal unravelling of the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous people that continues to reverberate in these communities today.

GET THE BOOK

Owl’s Nest Books | Calgary Public Library | Audio

BE CURIOUSER

  • Tanya Talaga is Rewriting Canadian History Her Way. –Maclean’s
  • Tanya Talaga to blend Canadian history and her family story in next book, coming out in August 2024. –CBC Books