Miriam Toews

Jury Citation

“‘If silence says more, why write?’” Years after the suicides of both her father and her sister, Miriam Toews writes into the silence to create an engrossing maze of associative fragments that grapple with the extraordinary in the everyday: death, motherhood, the writing life, marriage, divorce, youth, anger, douchebags, grandchildren, grief, forgiveness, lightsabers, and wind. Not merely wind, but a wind museum. Invited to respond to the question, “Why do I write?” for a writers’ event in Mexico City, Toews can’t produce what the committee wants. Since both silence and words are failures, the question Toews explores in this bittersweet, inventive, often comic and always virtuosic memoir, may as well be: “Why do you live?”—2025 Hilary Weston Prize Jury (Matthew R. Morris, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, and Niigaan Sinclair) 

Jury Citation

"Miriam Toews does not disappoint with her latest outing. Fight Night is a novel well-conceived and executed with prose that is powerful and subtle in equal measure — the weight of a lightly crafted sentence will, after a second’s suspension, come back with a punch. We’re given a unique and quirky take on the world through the eyes of precocious nine-year-old Swiv. Her observations, sometime hilarious, sometimes poignant, illustrate the lives of her mother and grandmother with a careful balance of wit, irony, dark humour, and philosophical musings. Fight Night is a thoughtful and thoroughly enjoyable read about women and girls navigating the world together." —2021 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Jury (Rebecca Fisseha, Michelle Good, and Steven Price)

Jury Citation

“In All My Puny Sorrows Miriam Toews manages to marry humour and grief so expertly that the most unbearable sadness is tempered by laughter and can therefore be borne. Yoli and Elf, the two sisters at the heart of the novel, are on opposite sides of a question about whether to live or die, but the love and compassion between them never falters. Toews, a dazzling literary alchemist who manages to summon all the joyous and heart-breaking humanity of her characters, has produced a work of astonishing depth. Reading it is an unforgettable experience.” — 2014 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize Jury (Neil Bissoondath, Helen Humphreys, and George Murray)

Jury Citation

“Miriam Toews is a terrifically good storyteller — engaging, tender and funny. The narrator in a Miriam Toews novel implicates us with her immediacy. She lives next door, she’s removed all the curtains, and we catch huge emotional glimpses of her life until, suddenly, she slips the curtains back on and we become the voyeurs, insistent on knowing more. She invites us onto her porch-swing, the poised, smart-aleck cousin whispering heartbreaking secrets in our ear and we don’t want her to stop. The teeter-totter of emotions she evokes is astounding, from the humorous to the melancholic and back again until laughter and sadness seep into one another. The ease of Toews’s writing is beguiling. Her stories are about loss and longing — characters stretching for anywhere else but here, and, all the while, looking for love. And approximations of happiness.” — 2010 Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award (David Bergen, Michael Winter, Eleanor Wachtel)

Jury Citation

“The Flying Troutmans is a love song to young people trying to navigate the volcanic world of adult emotions. Every detail of Miriam Toews young heroes’ behavior rings startlingly true and the dialogue is pitch perfect. The premise of the book is sad, yet its execution is filled to the brim with hilarity and joy. Toews captures the rawness of teenagers’ personalities—their fledging attempts at brilliance, their hysterical naivete, and their troubled longings. ” —2008 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize Jury (Lawrence Hill, Annabel Lyon, and Heather O’Neill)