Frances Itani is a fiction writer, poet and essayist. She is a Member of the Order of Canada and has won the CBC Short Story Prize twice. She has written 17 books.

Itani's bestselling novel Tell was shortlisted for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize in Canada. She won a Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best book in 2004 for Deafening, which was translated into 17 languages, shortlisted for the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was recently optioned for a TV miniseries. The novel was a contender for Canada Reads 2006. She is also the author of the bestselling book Remembering the Bones, which was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Requiem, chosen by the Washington Post as a top fiction title of 2012, and an illustrated children's book entitled Best Friend Trouble. In 2017, she published the novel That's My Baby.