Miriam Toews

My guest on this episode is Miriam Toews. Miriam is the author of the internationally acclaimed and bestselling novels Fight Night, Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Irma Voth, The Flying Troutmans, A Complicated Kindness, A Boy of Good Breeding, and Summer of My Amazing Luck, and the memoir, Swing Low: A Life. She is the winner of numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction, the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award. Several of her novels have been made into feature films, including All My Puny Sorrows and the Oscar-winning Women Talking. Her most recent book is the bestselling memoir A Truce That Is Not Peace, published by Knopf Canada in 2025. That book was a finalist For The Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize For Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award For Autobiography, and was named a best book the year by TIME, The Globe and Mail, the CBC, The New Yorker, The Guardian and more. Author Paula Hawkins called it “beautiful, hilarious, devastating.”Miriam and I talk about the early days of her writing career, about how she thinks every new book she completes is her last, and about how she got to hold the Oscar for Women Talking for only about five seconds.This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.