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Award winning author Miriam Toews wins $50,000 Writers’ Trust Fellowship
(Photo: Miriam Toews/Facebook)” width=”330″ height=”342″ /> The Toronto-based Toews was born and raised in the town of Steinbach, Man., which was first settled by Mennonites, and is the author of six novels and one work of non-fiction. (Photo: Miriam Toews/Facebook)
TORONTO—Award-winning author Miriam Toews is the recipient of the $50,000 Writers’ Trust Fellowship.
Toews was named the 2016 honouree at the Writers’ Trust Gala fundraiser held at the Ritz-Carlton in Toronto Wednesday night.
The fellowship is awarded to a writer who has demonstrated exceptional creative ability and outstanding promise in their published work.
The award is also intended to help ease the financial concerns of writers and provide them with the opportunity to work with as much creative freedom as possible.
The Toronto-based Toews was born and raised in the town of Steinbach, Man., which was first settled by Mennonites, and is the author of six novels and one work of non-fiction.
Toews is the two-time winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, receiving the award in 2008 for “The Flying Troutmans” and in 2014 for “All My Puny Sorrows,” which was also shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She was also awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction in 2004 for “A Complicated Kindness.
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In its citation, the Writers’ Trust described Toews as a writer “central to our national literature, straddling with ease the often separate worlds of critical acclaim and popular grassroots readership.”
“She has given the Manitoba Mennonites—heretofore a community underrepresented almost to the point of invisibility—a worldwide profile, and she has done it in ways that make their deeply rooted stories universal.”
The fellowship is part of a three-year plan by the Writers’ Trust to award $150,000 to Canadian writers to commemorate Canada’s 150th anniversary. The inaugural recipient was Newfoundland novelist and poet Michael Crummey.
“I’m deeply, deeply grateful and honoured to be selected for the Writers’ Trust Fellowship, especially considering the astounding literary talent in Canada,” Toews said in a statement.
“The fellowship affords me an extravagant amount of time to write, and time is the most meaningful gift a writer can receive.”
