Through her father, Melvin C. Toews, she is a direct descendant of one of Steinbach's first settlers, Klaas R. Reimer (1837–1906), who arrived in Manitoba in 1874 from Ukraine.
Her mother, Elvira Loewen, is a daughter of the late C. T. Loewen, an entrepreneur who founded a lumber business that would become Loewen Windows.
As a teenager, Toews rode horses and took part in provincial dressage and barrel-racing competitions and attended high school at the Steinbach Regional Secondary School.
She left Steinbach at eighteen, living in Montreal and London before settling in Winnipeg.
She has a B.A. in Film Studies from the University of Manitoba, and a Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of King's College, Halifax.
1964
Miriam Toews (born 1964) is a Canadian writer and author of nine books, including A Complicated Kindness (2004), All My Puny Sorrows (2014), and Women Talking (2018).
She has won a number of literary prizes including the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award for her body of work.
Toews is also a three-time finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a two-time winner of the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
1996
Toews wrote her first novel, Summer of My Amazing Luck (1996), while working as a freelance journalist.
The novel explores the evolving friendship of two single mothers in a Winnipeg public housing complex.
The novel was developed from a documentary that Toews was preparing for CBC Radio on the subject of welfare mothers.
It was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award.
1998
Toews won the latter prize with her second novel, A Boy of Good Breeding (1998).
Toews has written for CBC's WireTap, Canadian Geographic, Geist, The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, Intelligent Life, and Saturday Night.
Toews' father died by suicide in 1998.
His death inspired Toews to write a memoir in her father's voice, Swing Low: A Life.
The book was greeted as an instant classic in the modern literature on mental illness, and it won the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award.
1999
In 1999, she won a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Humour.
She is the author of The X Letters, a series of personal dispatches addressed to the father of her son, which were featured on This American Life in an episode about missing parents.
2004
Toews' third novel, A Complicated Kindness (2004), is set in East Village, a small religious Mennonite town much like her native Steinbach.
The narrator is Nomi Nickel, a curious, defiant, sardonic sixteen-year-old who dreams of hanging out with Lou Reed in the 'real' East Village of New York City.
She lives alone with her doleful father, after the departure of her older sister and the unexplained disappearance of her mother.
Unlike her father, who is a dutiful member of the church, Nomi is rebellious by nature, and her questioning brings her into conflict with the town's various authorities, most notably Hans Rosenfeldt, the sanctimonious church pastor.
A Complicated Kindness was highly acclaimed nationally and internationally, with the character of Nomi Nickel invoking comparisons to J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield.
It won the 2004 Governor General's Award for Fiction, described by the jury as "an unforgettable coming-of-age story... melancholic and hopeful, as beautifully complicated as life itself."
It was also shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award.
2006
The novel was selected for the 2006 edition of Canada Reads, the first book by a female writer to win the competition.
2007
Toews had a leading role in the feature film Silent Light, written and directed by Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas, and winner of the 2007 Cannes Jury Prize, an experience that informed her fifth novel, Irma Voth (2011).
Toews grew up in Steinbach, Manitoba, Canada the second daughter of Mennonite parents, both part of the Kleine Gemeinde.
2008
The Flying Troutmans (2008) is a road-trip novel narrated by 28-year-old Hattie, who takes charge of her teenage niece and nephew after her sister Min is admitted to a psychiatric ward.
Overwhelmed by the responsibility, Hattie enacts an ill-conceived plan to find the kids' long-lost father in California.
The novel was awarded the 2008 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
The jury described the novel as "a love song to young people trying to navigate the volcanic world of adult emotions."
The novel was also longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and named a Globe and Mail Best Book.
2011
With her fifth novel, Irma Voth (2011), Toews returned to the Mennonite community to re-examine the ways in which religious communities can limit personal freedom, and how belonging can turn to estrangement when old and new value systems clash.
The novel opens in an old order Mennonite settlement in Mexico's Chihuahuan Desert.
Nineteen-year-old Irma Voth has been banished to a neighbouring farm by her strict, religious father after secretly marrying a non-Mennonite Mexican.
Her new husband disappears into the drug trade and Irma is left alone to tend to the farm.
Her world is transformed when a filmmaker from Mexico City arrives to make a film about Mennonites.
Irma is hired as a translator for the film's female protagonist, and her involvement with the wildly creative film crew brings her into dangerous conflict with her father, while at the same time helping her better understand her place in the world.
