Tanya Talaga worked as a journalist at the Toronto Star for more than 20 years, covering everything from general city news to education, national healthcare, foreign news and Indigenous affairs. She is the acclaimed author of Seven Fallen Feathers, which won the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize, and delivered the 2018 CBC Massey Lectures.
Talaga has been nominated five times for the Michener Award in public service journalism, and was the 2017–2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy. She is of Polish and Indigenous descent. Her great-grandmother, Liz Gauthier, was a residential school survivor.
Her great-grandfather, Russell Bowen, was an Ojibwe trapper and labourer. Her grandmother is a member of Fort William First Nation. Talaga lives in Toronto with her two teenage children.
