Miriam Toews

Quick Facts

Full Name	Miriam Toews
Occupation	Writer
Date Of Birth	May 21, 1964(1964-05-21)
Age	60
Birthplace	Steinbach am Attersee
Country	Austria
Birth City	Upper Austria
Horoscope	Taurus

Miriam Toews Biography

Miriam Toews is one of the most popular and richest Writer who was born on May 21, 1964 in Steinbach am Attersee, Upper Austria, Austria. Toews was the second child of Mennonite parents and was raised in Steinbach, Manitoba. Melvin C. Toews is her father. She is a direct descendant from Klaas R.Reimer (1837-1906), a pioneer in Steinbach who arrived in Manitoba from Ukraine in 1874. Elvira Loewen is her mother. She is a daughter to the late C. T. Loewen who was a well-known entrepreneur and founded a lumber company that would eventually become Loewen Windows. Toews was a teenager and rode horses. She also participated in barrel-racing competitions. Toews attended Steinbach Regional Secondary School. At the age of eighteen she left Steinbach and moved to Montreal and London, before moving to Winnipeg. She holds a Bachelor of Arts. She holds a B.A. in Film Studies from University of Manitoba and a Bachelor of Journalism from University of King’s College Halifax.

Toews was a writer for CBC’s WireTap and Canadian Geographic. She also wrote for Geist, The Guardian Magazine, Intelligent Life, The New York Times Magazine, Intelligent Life and Saturday Night. She was awarded a National Magazine Award Gold Medal in Humour in 1999. She is also the author of The X Letters. These are a series personal messages to her son’s father that were featured on This American Life’s episode about missing parents.

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 town church, Nomi is rebellious by nature, and her compulsive questioning brings her into conflict with the town’s various authorities, most notably Hans Rosenfeldt, the sanctimonious church pastor.

Toews has said that Irma Voth was inspired in part by her experience in playing a lead role in Silent Light, the 2007 film written and directed by Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas. Reygadas invited Toews to do a screen test for the role of Esther, a conservative Mennonite wife, on the basis of reading her third novel, A Complicated Kindness, and seeing her author photo on the back flap of the book. The film was shot in Plautdietsch, a language neither the director nor Toews fully understood. Toews worked with her mother, a native speaker of Plautdietsch, to deliver her lines phonetically. The film won a number of international awards, including the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Toews was nominated for best actress at Mexico’s Ariel Awards for her performance, one of nine nominations for the film.

Toews’ dad committed suicide in 1998. Toews wrote Swing Low: A Memoir in the father’s voice after his death. It was an instant hit in modern literature about mental illness and won the McNally Robinson Book Award and the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award. Toews was a well-respected and active elementary school teacher who advocated for Steinbach’s first library. His father, Toews, suffered from bipolar disorder throughout his life. The Steinbach Library Board established the Melvin C. Toews Reading Garden, on the grounds of the original library that he had built. Marjorie Toews, Toews’ only sibling and older sister, committed suicide in 2010, 12 years after their father.

Miriam Toews Net Worth

Miriam Toews is one of the richest Writer from Austria. According to our analysis, Wikipedia, Forbes & Business Insider, Miriam Toews 's net worth $5 Million. (Last Update: December 11, 2023)

Miriam Toews, /’ t eI v z / – Canadian writer. She is best known for her novels All My Puny Sorrows (2014) and A Complicated Kindness (2004). She has been awarded a variety of literary prizes, including the Governor General’s Award in Fiction and the Writers’ trust Engel/Findley Award to body of work. She is also a finalist twice for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and a winner twice of the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize.

While working as a freelance journalist, Toews published her first novel, Summer of My Amazing Luck (1996). Toews’ documentary on welfare mothers, which Toews was preparing, inspired the novel. It explores the friendship that two mothers form in a Winnipeg housing complex. It was shortlisted to receive the Stephen Leacock Memorial medal for humor and the McNally Robinson book of the year award. Toews was awarded the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award with her second novel A Boy of Good Breeding (1998).

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. It spent over a year on the Canadian bestseller lists and went on to be selected for the 2006 edition of Canada Reads, the first book by a female writer to win the competition.

Height, Weight & Body Measurements

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Who is Miriam Toews Dating?

According to our records, Miriam Toews is possibily single & has not been previously engaged. As of December 1, 2023, Miriam Toews’s is not dating anyone.

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With her fifth novel, Irma Voth (2011), Toews returned to Mennonite settings, re-examining the ways in which 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. When her father’s violence escalates and the tragedy that has haunted her family begins to surface, Irma receives the blessing of her mother to flee the encampment, and to take her two younger sisters with her, one of whom is an infant. They eventually settle in Mexico City, where the two older sisters must embrace the ways of the city in order to survive and raise their infant sister.

Facts & Trivia

Miriam Ranked on the list of most popular Writer. Also ranked in the elit list of famous people born in Austria. Miriam Toews celebrates birthday on May 21 of every year.

All My Puny Sorrows received starred reviews in Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly and was a Reference and Users Services Association Notable Book. It also appeared on a number of year-end best-book lists, including The Globe and Mail, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and The Daily Telegraph. The novel won the 2014 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The jury described it as “a haunting novel of tremendous feeling, beautifully written and profoundly humane… Miriam Toews, a dazzling literary alchemist who manages to summon all the joyous and heart- breaking humanity of her characters, has produced a work of astonishing depth. Reading it is an unforgettable experience.” The novel was also awarded Italy’s 2015 Sinbad Prize for Foreign Fiction.

Is Miriam Toews a Mennonite?

She grew up in Steinbach, a town founded by Mennonites in the province of Manitoba , for which the colony in Bolivia was named. (“Toews,” which rhymes with “saves,” is as recognizably Mennonite as “Cohen” is Jewish.)

Who is Miriam Toews partner?

Miriam Toews
Alma mater| University of Manitoba University of King’s College
Period| 1990s–present
Notable works| A Complicated Kindness (2004), All My Puny Sorrows (2014), Women Talking (2018)
Spouse| Erik Rutherford

Is Georgia Toews related to Miriam Toews?

Miriam Toews lives in a Victorian row house in the downtown West End of Toronto. It’s a quiet, tree-lined street in a hub of industrial warehouses. Her 21-year-old daughter , Georgia, answers the door.

Where is Miriam Toews from?

Steinbach, Canada

At what age do Mennonites get married?

Furthermore, in the United States Mennonites tend to marry earlier than the rest of the population. The average age at marriage for men in 1989 was 23.2 and women 21.3 (Kauffman and Meyers 2001). In contrast the average for males and females in the general population was 26.2 and 23.9 (Eshleman 1997).