Tanya Talaga is a member of Fort William First Nation. Talaga’s mother was raised on the traditional territory of FWFN and in Graham, Treaty 9. Her father was Polish Canadian.
For more than 20 years, she was a journalist at the Toronto Star covering everything from health to education, investigations and Queen’s Park. She is now a regular columnist at The Globe and Mail. In 2021 she was part of a Globe team that won the Michener Award in public service journalism for reporting on the Catholic Church's efforts to avoid responsibility regarding Indian Residential Schools, and the pursuit of an apology from Pope Francis. She has been part of teams that won two National Newspaper Awards for Project of the Year while at The Star.
Talaga's first book, Seven Fallen Feathers, is a national bestseller, winning the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and the First Nation Communities Read Award: Young Adult/Adult. The book was also a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and the BC National Award for Nonfiction.
Her second book, All Our Relations: Finding The Path Forward, is also a national bestseller, finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and a finalist for the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.
Her third book, The Knowing: The Enduring Legacy of Indian Residential Schools, will be out in early 2024.
Talaga was the 2017–2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy and the 2018 CBC Massey Lecturer, the first Anishinaabe woman to be so.
In 2018, she founded Makwa Creative Inc., a production company focused on amplifying Indigenous voices through documentary films, TV and podcasts, including the podcast AuntieUp!, made for Indigenous women, by Indigenous women. She has five honorary doctorates.