About Sarah Henstra

Sarah Henstra (she/her) is the author of five books, including the 2018 Governor General’s Award -winning novel The Red Word. She is an Associate Professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Henstra’s newest novel, The Lost Tarot, will be published in June 2024 by Doubleday Canada. 

Henstra’s third novel, We Contain Multitudes, was selected as the 2022 “Vermont Reads” title by the Vermont Humanities Council. It was a ParnassusNext Club pick at Parnassus Books and shortlisted for the Ontario Library Association’s White Pine Award. Booklist called it “an absolutely extraordinary work of fiction that proves the epistolary novel is an art form.”

Her second novel, The Red Word, won the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and was nominated for the Dublin International Literary Award and the Republic of Consciousness Award. The GG jury called it “an astonishing evisceration of the cliches of sexual politics” and “an utterly effing good read.”

Her first novel, a YA historical adventure-romance titled Mad Miss Mimic, made several best-of-the-year lists and was shortlisted for awards by the Canadian Library Association and the Canadian Children’s Book Centre. NOW magazine named it “a very entertaining thriller with a feminist twist.”

Henstra earned a PhD in twentieth century British literature at the University of Toronto. An award-winning, tenured faculty member at Toronto Metropolitan University, Henstra teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in creative writing, critical theory, psychoanalysis & literature, the Gothic, and fairy tales. The scholarly monograph that developed from her dissertation work, The Counter-Memorial Impulse in Twentieth-Century English Fiction, was published by Palgrave Macmillan. In 2022, Henstra was named a Massey College Research Fellow. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, the Toronto Arts Council, the Siena Art Institute (Italy), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (USA), and Mauser Ecohouse (Costa Rica). 

Henstra is the daughter of Dutch neo-Calvinist (Reformed) immigrants whose community settled a 2900-ha span of organic muck north of Toronto called the Holland Marsh. Long used for hunting and fishing by Huron and Iroquois peoples, the marsh was drained in the 1920s for settler farming and turned over to several waves of Netherlanders who knew their way around dikes and canals. Henstra’s parents struck out for the wilder, wetter coast of British Columbia when she was a baby but brought her back inland at puberty. She currently lives in Toronto.

Henstra has read widely from her work, led workshops and lectured at academic conferences and literary festivals worldwide—Adelaide, Budapest, Cheltenham, Edinburgh, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York, Vancouver. To book her for speaking engagements, please inquire here.