She studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of King's College, and has also worked as a freelance newspaper and radio journalist. Her 2004 novel A Complicated Kindness was her breakthrough work, spending several weeks on the Canadian bestseller lists and winning the Governor General's Award for English Fiction. The novel, about a teenage girl who longs to escape her small Mennonite town and hang out with Lou Reed in New York City, was also nominated for the Giller Prize.
Toews was the first in her own family to quit the town of Steinbach, on which the fictional East Village is kind-of-yet-not-exactly based.
Toews realised she had to leave with a certainty and urgency that surprises me, because she doesn't seem anything like strident or abrasive enough to alienate anyone, not even religious nut-nuts.
Toews lives around the corner from her mother and sister, and there is a constant traffic of family members through her house.
Toews grew up in just such a town herself - the events described in the book, she says wryly, are entirely fictitious, but much of the texture is located in her own early life.
Toews was the first in her own family to quit the town of Steinbach, on which the fictional East Village is kind-of-yet-not-exactly based.
Toews lives around the corner from her mother and sister, and there is a constant traffic of family members through her house.
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