Aviaq Johnston

Load Photo Courtesy the Artist

Biography

Originally from Iglulik, NU, award-winning author Aviaq Johnston now calls Iqaluit, NU, home. A graduate of the Nunavut Sivuniksavut program and Canadore College, her debut Young Adult novel, Those Who Run in the Sky (2017) won the Indigenous Voices Award for the most significant work of prose in English in 2018 and was additionally shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for literature for young people [1]. Following shortly on the heels of her early success. Johnston released the sequel to her first novel, Those Who Dwell Below, in 2019, intending to eventually complete the series as a fantasy trilogy.

“I think it's almost impossible for me to write reality or to have a story set in the modern day.” She says of her preferred genres, “There always has to be some element of fantasy in my stories, something supernatural. I've been reading so much science fiction lately so I'm starting to lean more on that side as something I'm going to work on in the future [2].”

While she is primarily a Young Adult author, Johnston also has a children’s book, What’s My Superpower? which was released in 2017.

This Profile was made possible through support from the RBC Foundation’s Emerging Artists Project.