Selected Press
by Emily Donaldson
I’D LIKE TO READ…a novel with a tinge of the strange or fantastical.
The CBC’s list of anticipated spring fiction, including The Lost Tarot by Sarah Henstra
by Kevin O’Connor When the Vermont Reads program unveiled its first LGBTQ+ selection this past year, it didn’t anticipate a record number of nationwide calls to ban such books.
CBC Books associate producer Talia Kliot speaks with The Next Chapter host Ali Hassan about three of her favourite campus novels, including Sarah Henstra’s The Red Word. "People are branching out of the communities that they've grown up in and the age of 18 to 24 is about growth and coming of age," says Kliot. "Everyone's making mistakes… Also there's just an arrogance and an idealism of youth which…makes for great satire." (click to listen)
by Shanda Deziel Sitting in the kitchen of her west-end Toronto home in mid-March, Henstra looks out on a backyard garden that she recently landscaped (using some of the award money). It should start blooming around the same time that her next novel is published.
by Brian Bethune The coming year will be a time to test that notion in Canadian literature, given the way 2017’s national prize juries have shown, in a politically roiled era, unusually clear responses to politically charged writing.
by Randy Boyagoda Sarah Henstra’s The Red Word won the 2018 Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction in English. In its citation, the prize jury declared it “groundbreaking and provocative,” and commended the novel as “an astonishing evisceration of the clichés of sexual politics as they exist not only on our college campuses, but also within broader present-day society.”