Sarah Henstra

Sarah Henstra, PhD (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 most recent novel, The Lost Tarot (Doubleday, 2024), was an instant Canadian bestseller. We Contain Multitudes (Little, Brown, 2019) was selected as the 2022 Vermont Reads title by the Vermont Humanities Council 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.”

The Red Word (Grove/ECW/Tramp, 2018) won the 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 cited it as “an astonishing evisceration of the clichés of sexual politics” and “an utterly effing good read.” Henstra’s YA historical adventure novel Mad Miss Mimic (Penguin, 2015) made several best-of-the-year lists. It 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 at the University of Toronto, and her scholarly monograph The Counter-Memorial Impulse in Twentieth-Century English Fiction (2009) was published by Palgrave Macmillan. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, Massey College, the Siena Art Institute, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.