Longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize
From the internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer who has
dazzled and enthralled the world with music it had never heard
before, a fierce, tender, heartbreaking story unlike anything
you've ever read.
TANYA TAGAQ is an improvisational performer, avant-garde composer, and experimental recording artist who won the 2014 Polaris Music Prize for her album Animism, a work that disrupted the music world in Canada and beyond with its powerfully original vision. Tagaq contorts elements of punk, metal, and electronica into a complex and contemporary sound that begins in breath, a communal and fundamental phenomenon. While the Polaris Prize signaled an awakening to Tanya Tagaq's art and messages, she has been touring and collaborating with an elite international circle of artists for over a decade. Tagaq's improvisational approach lends itself to collaboration across genres, and recent projects have pulled her in vastly different directions, from contributing guest vocals to a F**ked Up song (a hardcore punk band from Toronto) to premiering a composition made for Kronos Quartet's Fifty for the Future collection, and composing a piece for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Tanya's most recent album Retribution was released in fall 2016.
Audiobook finalist for the 2019 Audie Awards (Literary Fiction &
Classics category)
WINNER of the 2018 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book
Design – Prose Fiction
SHORTLISTED for the 2019 Amazon First Novel Award
SHORTLISTED for the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
“Tagaq’s surreal meld of poetry and prose transmutes the Arctic’s
boundless beauty, intensity, and desolation into a wrenching
contemporary mythology.”
—The New Yorker
“Though the protagonist’s coming-of-age story, generously and
lovingly documented by Tagaq, is the anchor, Split Tooth is not a
book that can be fully absorbed in one sitting. It’s possible to
sink deeper and deeper into the narrative with each successive
reading. Like a smirking teenager, Split Tooth blithely gives
typical literary expectations the finger, daring us to see and
experience narrative as chaotic, emotional, and deeply instinctive.
And it succeeds.”
—Quill and Quire
“A raw, powerful voice breathes fresh air into traditional Inuit
folklore to create a modern tale of mythological proportions.”
—Kirkus
“Tanya’s book is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever read.
It’s deeply profound, emotional and personal, and furthers her
artistic experimentation and genius into a new realm. I love her
even more after reading it, and I’m once again awed by her
talent.”
—Jesse Wente, CBC Broadcaster
“[Split Tooth] straddles the line between memoir and fiction, prose
and poetry, magic and harsh reality. . . [and] is infused with
Tagaq's intimate knowledge of life in the Arctic.”
—Oprah Magazine
“[A] forceful coming-of-age tale.”
—Toronto Life magazine
“[Split Tooth is] one of the best things I’ve ever read. Amazing.
Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. The last two pages of her book are just
this whole beautiful piece about: I don’t want to forgive. But I
forgive myself. I’ll pick it up every once in a while just to read
that.”
—Elliot Page
“In [Tanya Tagaq]’s forthcoming novel, Split Tooth, there’s a
chapter called “Ritual” that is such a distillation of childhood
magic and refuge that it made me feel like I was reading Tove
Jansson or Roald Dahl for the first time.”
—Sean Michaels, Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author of Us
Conductors
“An ambitious and acrobatic blend of memoir, fiction, poetry, and
dream journals.”
—Refinery29
“Tanya Tagaq has written a book that should re-arrange the reader’s
mind and very being in her astounding Split Tooth. She uses the
narrative arc of a coming of age story to tell of coming of age in
a northern, indigenous community that includes close experience of
abuse, village violence, colonial exploitation, and also close kin
ties, birth, death, a knowing of how we are really fed, an
awareness of how small life can be, and how large … I look forward
to putting this book in people’s hands.”
—Rick Simonson, owner of Elliott Bay Book Company
“[Split Tooth] boldly and cohesively mixes memoir, traditional folk
tales, poetry and fiction to depict the humiliations and hilarities
of coming-of-age, the formidable power of Nunavut’s landscape, the
resilience of women … The book is like nothing I’ve ever read
before, exhilarating in its carnality, experimentation,
vulnerability and wisdom.”
—Now Magazine
“Neither fully autobiography nor fiction, Split Tooth is brutal,
beautiful literary magic.”
—Exclaim Magazine
“Tagaq’s genre-defying work establishes her as a careful, gifted
wordsmith” —Publishers Weekly
“Split Tooth is both fractured and direct, horrible and beautiful,
so surreal in its reality, so real in its surreality…Tagaq's
writing is both weighted down in the troubled, material world while
also being free to explore the ageless, phantasmagorical world that
exists behind it. There are realities that exist beyond our own,
and they are all gathered and explored here.”
—Bookshelf.ca
“In simplest terms, Split Tooth is a punch to the throat…a stellar
first novel; an incredible work of Canadian, indigenous, and world
literatures.”
—PopMatters
“Tagaq has broken a new trail for all future Inuit writers to tread
upon, describing the lived world of an Inuk child with writing that
is breathtaking and singular…With this work Tagaq has reshaped what
Inuit literature is… it is impossible to stop reading. It is
delicious. And offers a new way forward for Inuit authors.”
—Inuit Art Quarterly
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