Deborah Ellis

In December 2016, Ellis was named a Member of the Order of Canada.

In 2014, she published Moon at Nine, a YA novel based on the true story of two teenage girls who are arrested and thrown in prison in Iran, a country where homosexuality is punishable by death.

In 2008, Ellis published Lunch with Lenin and Other Stories, a collection of short stories that explores the lives of children who have been affected directly, or indirectly, by drugs. The stories are set against backdrops as diverse as the remote north of Canada to Moscow's Red Square to an opium farm in Afghanistan.

In 2007, with Eric Walters, Ellis wrote Bifocal, a novel about racism and terrorists in Canada.

In 2006, she wrote the best-seller, I Am a Taxi, which tells the story of a Colombian boy named Diego whose family was accused of smuggling coca paste, which is used to produce cocaine. After an accident causes Diego's family to owe money to the prison in which they are incarcerated in, the boy must earn them money. He ends up in the coca "pits" where the coca leaves are made into coca paste, and the story follows his adventures from there. The sequel, Sacred Leaf, is about Diego's time with the Ricardos (a family who helped Diego) and a giant coca leaf protest.

One of her best known works is the 2004 book The Heaven Shop, which tells of a family of orphans in Malawi who are struggling with sudden displacement as a result of the HIV/AIDS impact. The novel was written to dispel myths about HIV/AIDS and celebrate the courage of child sufferers.

In 1999, her novel Looking for X was published. It follows a young girl in her day-to-day life in a poor area of Toronto and it received the Governor General's Award for English-language children's literature in 2000.

She travelled to Pakistan in 1997 to interview refugees at an Afghan refugee camp. From these interviews, she wrote The Breadwinner series, which includes The Breadwinner (2001), a book about a girl named Parvana, Parvana's Journey (2002), its sequel, Mud City (2003), about Shauzia, Parvana's best friend, and My Name is Parvana (2011), the final book in the series. While The Breadwinner was inspired by an interview with a mother and a girl who disguised herself as a boy in a refugee camp, the subsequent books in the series were more imaginative explorations of how children would survive.

Deborah Ellis CM OOnt (born August 7, 1960) is an award-winning Canadian fiction-writer and activist. Her themes are often concerned with the sufferings of persecuted children in the Third World.