Swing Low: A Life

Miriam Toews (pronounced tâves) was born in 1964 in the small Mennonite town of Steinbach, Manitoba. She left Steinbach at eighteen, living in Montreal and London and touring Europe before coming back to Manitoba, where she earned her B.A. in film studies at the University of Manitoba. Later she packed up with her children and partner and moved to Halifax to attend the University of King’s College, where she received her bachelor’s degree in journalism. Upon returning to Winnipeg with her family in 1991, she freelanced at the CBC, making radio documentaries. When her youngest daughter started nursery school, Toews decided it was time to try writing a novel. 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. Toews has also written for the CBC, This American Life (on National Public Radio), Saturday Night , Geist , Canadian Geographic , Open Letters and The New York Times Magazine , and she has won the National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Humour. Published in 2000, Swing Low: A Life won both the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction. The book garnered praise for, among other things, the remarkable courage and candour Toews displayed in writing about her father’s struggle with bipolar disorder and his suicide. In an interview with Maclean’s , she said, “Keeping this hush-hush, regarding it as a shameful thing — I knew how destructive that kind of silence is. I wanted his life to be known and honoured.” In writing about her father, Toews was also driven by a need to alleviate her own pain and bewilderment. “When somebody you know and love has committed suicide it’s so hard to understand. You just don’t know how it could have happened. You want to be inside that person’s head so you can figure out why this person made this choice.… I wanted to be inside his head, and in order to do that I had to become him,” she says on powells.com.

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