Dionne Brand has won the 2019 Toronto Book Award for her novel, Theory.
“Theory begins as its narrator sets out, like many a graduate student, to write a wildly ambitious thesis on the past, present, and future of art, culture, race, gender, class, and politic — a revolutionary work that its author believes will synthesize and thereby transform the world.”
Regarding Brand, the Toronto Book Awards jury has said that she “dazzles with smart, jazz-like storytelling and the utterly engrossing voice of its narrator,” and describes Theory as a “wry, beautiful, [and] profoundly philosophical novel.”
Theory was selected from a list of finalists that also included:
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- Be With: Letters to a Caregiver by Mike Barnes (Biblioasis)
- Reproduction by Ian Williams (Random House Canada)
- The Student by Cary Fagan (Freehand Books)
- This Country of Mine by Didier Leclair (Deux Voiliers Publishing)
Brand has won the Toronto Book Award once before, in 2006 for her novel What We All Long For (a perennial favourite that often appears on reading lists and syllabi). She has also won the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry, the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry, the Harbourfront Writers’ Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2009, she served as poet laureate of Toronto and in 2017, Brand was appointed to the Order of Canada.
Currently, Brand teaches poetry and prose at the University of Guelph’s creative writing MFA program.