Johanna Skibsrud is a Canadian-American writer, whose debut novel, The Sentimentalists, was awarded the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, making her the youngest writer to win Canada’s most prestigious literary prize. 

Johanna’s fiction also include two other novels, Quartet for the End of Time (Hamish Hamilton 2014) and Island (Hamish Hamilton Canada 2019; nominated for the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic), two collection of short fiction, Tiger, Tiger (2016; shortlisted for the Alistair Macleod Prize for Short Fiction) and This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories (2012; shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award), and the co-author of a children's book, Sometimes We Think You are a Monkey (Penguin 2015). Johanna has also published three books of poetry, Late Nights with Wild Cowboys (2008; shortlisted for Canada's Gerald Lampert Award for best first poetry collection by a Canadian author),  I Do Not Think that I Could Love a Human Being (2011; shortlisted for the Atlantic Poetry Prize) and The Description of the World (2016; awarded the 2017 Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry, the 2017 Fred Cogswell Award, and shortlisted for the 2017 Pat Lowther Award) and three non-fiction titles: Fool (Routledge 2023), The Poetic Imperative: A Speculative Aesthetics (McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020) and “The nothing that is”: Essays on Art, Literature and Being (Bookhug 2019). A new poetry collection, Medium, is forthcoming from Book*hug in spring 2024.

Born in Nova Scotia, Canada in 1980, Johanna received her BA in English Literature at the University of Toronto, her MA in English and Creative Writing from Concordia University in Montreal, and her PhD in English Literature at the Université de Montréal.  She is currently Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona and divides her time between Tucson, Arizona, and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.