44 Governor General's Award winning fiction writers

Margaret Eleanor Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. Since 1961, she has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of non-fiction, nine collections of short fiction, eight children's books, and two graphic novels, as well as a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including the Booker Prize (twice), Arthur C. Clarke Award, Governor General's Award, Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, and the National Book Critics and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television.

Gérard Bessette was a French Canadian writer and educator.

Marie-Claire Blais, is a French Canadian writer, novelist, poet, and playwright from the province of Quebec.

Bertram Richard Brooker, was one of Canada's first abstract painters. A self-taught polymath, in addition to being a visual artist, Brooker was a Governor General's Award-winning novelist, as well as a poet, screenwriter, playwright, essayist, copywriter, graphic designer, and advertising executive. He is well known as an early Canadian Abstract artist.

Jean Marc Dalpé is a Canadian playwright and poet. He is one of the most important figures in Franco-Ontarian literature.

William Robertson Davies was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best known and most popular authors and one of its most distinguished "men of letters", an unfashionable term Davies gladly accepted for himself. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate residential college associated with the University of Toronto.

Réjean Ducharme was a Canadian novelist and playwright who resided in Montreal. He was known for his reclusive personality and did not appear at any public functions since his first successful book was published in 1966. A common theme of his early work was the rejection of the adult world by children.

Timothy Irving Frederick Findley, was a Canadian novelist and playwright. He was also informally known by the nickname Tiff or Tiffy, an acronym of his initials.

Dominique Fortier is a Canadian novelist and translator from Quebec, who won the Governor General's Award for French-language fiction at the 2016 Governor General's Awards for her novel Au péril de la mer.

Mavis Leslie de Trafford Gallant,, née Young, was a Canadian writer who spent much of her life and career in France. Best known as a short story writer, she also published novels, plays and essays.

Karoline Georges is a Canadian writer and multidisciplinary artist from Quebec, whose novel De synthèse won the Governor General's Award for French-language fiction at the 2018 Governor General's Awards.

Jacques Godbout, OC, CQ is a Canadian novelist, essayist, children's writer, journalist, filmmaker and poet. By his own admission a bit of a dabbler (touche-à-tout), Godbout has become one of the most important writers of his generation, with a major influence on post-1960 Quebec intellectual life.

Igor Sergeyevich Gouzenko was a cipher clerk for the Soviet embassy to Canada in Ottawa, Ontario. He defected on 5 September 1945, three days after the end of World War II, with 109 documents on the USSR's espionage activities in the West. This forced Canada's Prime Minister Mackenzie King to call a Royal Commission to investigate espionage in Canada.

Germaine Guèvremont, born Grignon was a Canadian writer, who was a prominent figure in Quebec literature.

Anne Hébert, was a French Canadian author and poet. She won Canada's top literary honor, the Governor General's Award, three times, twice for fiction and once for poetry.

Nancy Louise Huston, OC is a Canadian-born novelist and essayist who writes primarily in French and translates her own works into English.

Joel Thomas Hynes is a Canadian novelist, screenwriter, actor, producer, director and musician, known for his irreverent, oftentimes dark and uproarious characters and a raw, unflinching vision of modern underground Canada.

Thomas King is an American-Canadian writer and broadcast presenter who most often writes about North America's First Nations.

Jean Margaret Laurence was a Canadian novelist and short story writer, and is one of the major figures in Canadian literature. She was also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community.

Clarence Malcolm Lowry was an English poet and novelist who is best known for his 1947 novel Under the Volcano, which was voted No. 11 in the Modern Library 100 Best Novels list.

John Hugh MacLennan was a Canadian author and professor of English at McGill University. He won five Governor General's Awards and a Royal Bank Award.

Antonine Maillet, is an Acadian novelist, playwright, and scholar. She was born in Bouctouche, New Brunswick, Canada.

Claire Martin, was the pseudonym of the Canadian writer Claire Montreuil. She wrote mainly in French. Her novels often have themes of women's liberation and erotic relationships. Martin frequently revealed her devotions toward the "Frenchness" and Quebec nationalism as saying "I prefer to be of Quebec." or "I feel closer to love as a French-Canadian." In her works, Quebec and French-Canadian are portrayed as well-educated and living well. Martin focused her writing style on risks and illnesses of love, and wrote with prejudice and social conventions. Her works are characterized by purity and crafty use of language.

Andrée A. Michaud is a Canadian novelist and playwright from Quebec. She is a two-time winner of the Governor General's Award for French-language fiction, for Le ravissement at the 2001 Governor General's Awards and for Bondrée at the 2014 Governor General's Awards, and won the Prix Ringuet in 2007 for Mirror Lake. Boundary, translated by Donald Winkler, has been longlisted for the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Brian Moore, was a novelist and screenwriter from Northern Ireland who emigrated to Canada and later lived in the United States. He was acclaimed for the descriptions in his novels of life in Northern Ireland after the Second World War, in particular his explorations of the inter-communal divisions of The Troubles, and has been described as "one of the few genuine masters of the contemporary novel". He was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1975 and the inaugural Sunday Express Book of the Year award in 1987, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. Moore also wrote screenplays and several of his books were made into films.

Philip Michael Ondaatje, is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, fiction writer, essayist, novelist, editor, and filmmaker. He is the recipient of multiple literary awards such as the Governor General's Award, the Giller Prize, the Booker Prize, and the Prix Médicis étranger. Ondaatje is also an Officer of the Order of Canada, recognizing him as one of Canada's most renowned living authors.

Kate Pullinger is a Canadian novelist and author of digital fiction, lecturing at De Montfort University, England. She was born 1961 in Cranbrook, British Columbia, Canada, and went to high school on Vancouver Island. She dropped out of McGill University, Montreal, after a year and a half and subsequently worked for a year in a copper mine in the Yukon. She then travelled and settled in London, where she now resides.

Paul Lewis Quarrington was a Canadian novelist, playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker, musician and educator.

Nino Pio Ricci is a Canadian novelist who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He was born in Leamington, Ontario to Italian immigrants, Virginio and Amelia Ricci, from the province of Isernia, Molise.

David Adams Richards is a Canadian writer and member of the Canadian Senate.

Mordecai Richler was a Canadian writer. His best known works are The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) and Barney's Version (1997). His 1970 novel St. Urbain's Horseman and 1989 novel Solomon Gursky Was Here were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He is also well known for the Jacob Two-Two children's fantasy series. In addition to his fiction, Richler wrote numerous essays about the Jewish community in Canada, and about Canadian and Quebec nationalism. Richler's Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! (1992), a collection of essays about nationalism and anti-Semitism, generated considerable controversy.

Leon Rooke, CM is a Canadian novelist. He was born in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina in the United States. Educated at the University of North Carolina, he moved to Canada in 1969. He now lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Gabrielle Roy was a Canadian author from St. Boniface, Manitoba and one of the major figures in French Canadian literature.

Aki Shimazaki is a Canadian novelist and translator. She moved to Canada in 1981, living in Vancouver and Toronto. She has lived in Montreal, where she teaches Japanese and publishes her novels in French, since 1991.

Josef Škvorecký was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher. He spent half of his life in Canada, publishing and supporting banned Czech literature during the communist era. Škvorecký was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1980. He and his wife were long-time supporters of Czech dissident writers before the fall of communism in that country. Škvorecký's fiction deals with several themes: the horrors of totalitarianism and repression, the expatriate experience, and the miracle of jazz.

Linda Spalding is a Canadian writer and editor. Born in Topeka, Kansas, the daughter of Jacob Alan Dickinson and Edith Senner, she lived in Mexico and Hawaii before moving to Toronto, Ontario in 1982.

Edward Alan Sullivan was a Canadian poet and author of short stories. He is noted for his 1935 historical adventure novel The Great Divide, which depicts the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.

Joan Thomas is a Canadian novelist and book reviewer from Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Kim Thúy Ly Thanh, CQ is a Vietnamese-born Canadian writer, whose debut novel Ru won the Governor General's Award for French-language fiction at the 2010 Governor General's Awards.

Miriam Toews is a Canadian writer, best known for her novels A Complicated Kindness (2004) and All My Puny Sorrows (2014). She has won a number of literary prizes including the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award for body of work. She is also a two-time finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a two-time winner of the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.

Élise Turcotte is a Canadian writer. She completed her BA and MA in literary studies at the University of Quebec and later received her doctorate at the Université de Sherbrooke. She now teaches literature at a CEGEP in Montreal, where she currently resides. Her writing has won much praise, and among other things she has won the Grand Prix de Poésie, as well as the 2003 Governor General's Award for her novel La Maison étrangère and the Prix Émile-Nelligan for La voix de Carla in 1987 and for La terre est ici in 1989.

Pierre Turgeon is a Canadian novelist and essayist from Quebec.

Jane Urquhart, Order of Canada OC is a Canadian novelist and poet born in Geraldton, Ontario. She is the internationally acclaimed author of seven award-winning novels, three books of poetry and numerous short stories. As a novelist, Urquhart is well known for her evocative style which blends history with the present day. Her first novel, The Whirlpool, gained her international recognition when she became the first Canadian to win France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger. Her subsequent novels were even more successful. Away, published in 1993, won the Trillium Award and was a national bestseller. In 1997, her fourth novel, The Underpainter, won the Governor General's Literary Award.