IFOA Midland: Sarah Hall and Miram Toews

Sarah Hall is the author of three previous critically acclaimed novels, including the multiple award winners Haweswater and Daughters of the North, and The Electric Michelangelo. Her work has been translated into many languages and she is currently working on a collection of short stories and a radio adaptation of Daughters of the North. Hall’s decades-spanning How to Paint a Dead Man is a luminous and searching novel about the sacrifices made for the sake of art.

Martin Levin is Books Editor of the Globe and Mail, and an irregular blogger and reviewer as well. He has co-written a play about the world’s worst film director and contributed personal essays to a number of anthologies, most recently Great Expectations: Twenty-four True Stories about Childbirth.

Miriam Toews is the author of three previous novels – Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, and the Governor General’s Literary Award-winning A Complicated Kindness – and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. Toews presents her latest novel, The Flying Troutmans, winner of the 2008 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Following an SOS call from her niece, Hattie returns to Canada only to find her sister on her way to the psychiatric ward. The three set off on a wild road trip to find the kids’ long-lost father.