Miriam Toews

Miriam Toews is an author whose unique voice blends joyous humour and wry wit with human tragedy. Born to Mennonite parents in Steinbach, Manitoba, she left home at 18, eventually settling in Winnipeg. Miriam earned a degree in Film Studies from the University of Manitoba and a degree in Journalism from the University of King's College, Halifax. She completed her first novel, The Summer of My Amazing Luck, in 1996, while working as a freelance journalist. Both her journalism and her early literary works met with critical approval, but it was Toews' third novel, A Complicated Kindness, published in 2004, that brought her national and international acclaim. For her six novels and one memoir, she has received numerous honours, including a Governor General's Award for Literature. Like all of her novels, her most recent, All My Puny Sorrows, draws generously from traumatic events in her own life.

“In all my writing, I use my own life and I try to make sense of things—things that have happened to me, things that have happened in the world.”