Toronto author earns GG honour for The Red Word
Toronto author Sarah Henstra says she thinks her win at this year’s Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language fiction signals that Canadian readers are hungry for literature that tackles thorny cultural issues.
Henstra is among the winners announced Tuesday for her first foray into adult fiction, The Red Word, set at the epicentre of the polarized debate about sexual assault on university campuses.
The novel follows 19-year-old Karen Huls, a Canadian student at a prominent U.S. college in the 1990s, who is awakened to the ambiguities of gender politics after moving in with a group of radical feminist activists while dating a member of a fraternity notorious for drug-fuelled misogyny.
When she learned she had won the $25,000 award, Henstra said she first had to make sure that someone wasn’t trying to pull a fast one on her. “You sure this isn’t a joke?” Henstra recalled asking a prize administrator.
A peer review described the work as “groundbreaking and provocative,” and an “astonishing evisceration of the clichés of sexual politics.”
The committee also uncharacteristically invoked foul language in their citation to applaud Henstra’s incisive blend of ancient mythology and contemporary issues.
But before the deluge of critical acclaim, Henstra, who also authored the 2015 young adult novel Mad Miss Mimic, said she struggled to find a publisher for The Red Word, which eventually landed at ECW Press, because of the novel’s prickly subject matter and reluctance to issue black-andwhite moral judgments.
“I don’t offer easy answers in the novel, and I think that was difficult for some publishers to imagine how they would frame that for readers,” Henstra said in a phone interview in between classes at Ryerson University, where she teaches English literature.
Henstra said her students have connected with the book, and while some have been dismayed by the lack of justice for the characters they consider to be the story ’s antagonists, they recognize the “fog of war” that takes hold when the ideas they learn about in the classroom play out in practice.
Teaching also gives Henstra a first-hand glimpse of how the feminist discourse has changed with a generation of activists emboldened by the #MeToo movement and versed in the fluidity of gender.
“I think the vocabulary is much clearer now, and more agreed upon now, than it was in the 1990s,” said Henstra.
“We’re able to have a much wider conversation now, and get many, many more women’s experiences into the conversation.”
Henstra said the persistence of mythologies about gender, which she explores both in the novel and the classroom, can instil a sense of “hopelessness” that these notions are so deeply ingrained in our culture, they can never change.
But she said the Governor General’s Literary Award’s recognition of The Red Word suggests that a new kind of mythology could be emerging as conversations about gender take centre stage in the literary world and beyond.
“I think it speaks to a kind of courage we have as readers in Canada right now,” Henstra said. “(There’s) a kind of a real thirst to engage with these issues in real ways, and to grapple with them rather than try to jump to easy solutions.”