Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Miriam Toews

Miriam Toews’s first novel, Summer of My Amazing Luck, was published in 1996; it was nominated for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and won the John Hirsch Award. Published two years later, her second novel, A Boy of Good Breeding, won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. Her most recent novel is the bestselling A Complicated Kindness, which was a Giller Prize Finalist and won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.

Her new novel, Irma Voth, will be released in September.

From her Q & A with Dan Eltringham at the Financial Times:

Who are your literary influences?

Alice Munro, David Markson, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf.
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What is the last thing you read that made you laugh out loud?

The Meaning of Life by Terry Eagleton.
* * *

Who would you most like to sit next to at a dinner party?

Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, so I can let him know how profoundly disappointed I am in him.
* * *

What book do you wish you’d written?

A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley.
Read the complete interview.

--Marshal Zeringue