Performer and oral storyteller Tanya Tawhida Evanson lights up when she speaks about her art. After all, she has dedicated the last 20 years to honing her craft and sharing her work around the world.
Now her debut fiction novel the Book of Wings has earned her the 2022 Blue Metropolis/Conseil des arts de Montréal New Contribution Literary Prize.
The semi-biographical book circles around the life of Maya as she traverses the globe on a journey from Vancouver to the United States, the Caribbean, Paris, and Morocco.
As her own love life crumbles and her lover leaves her, she finds herself on a path toward personal discovery and spiritual fulfillment that leads her deep into the North African landscape.
The book, Evanson says, is about learning and spiritual growth.
Initially, she expressed her arts through oral poetry. She tells the CONTACT that the Book of Wings had been in the works for the past seven years. Her journey in writing came from a tough place, as a teen grappling with identity and a myriad of other things she tried to take her life.
“I ended up in the hospital and friend from high school came to visit me and brought me a journal. And I started writing poetry, and that poetry saved me. It allowed me to see what was going on like to see what was going on in my head. Outside of my head. And that was a very useful mirror to have,” she explains.
She never put her pen down, writing as she jostled with her identity and continued to make art from her life and what she saw around her.
On a sojourn to Vancouver she got introduced to Sufism ( A mystical Islamic belief and practice in which Muslims seek to find the truth of divine love and knowledge through direct personal experience of God. It consists of a variety of mystical paths that are designed and to facilitate the experience of the presence of divine love and wisdom in the world.)
Soon after, Evanson published two collections of poetry, Bothism (2017) and Nouveau Griot (2018), all while working on the Book of Wings, starting and stopping as she puts it.
“It wasn’t a conscious decision, it was just that the writing began to change because I had an experience about 20 years ago where I have went to traveling with a partner and we went through the States, through the Caribbean, through France and he left me in Paris in the springtime, because that’s how poets do it,” she explains.
“And I was so heartbroken that I didn’t want to go back home with my tail between my legs. And so I kept going and I thought, where am I going to go? I looked around and the motherland was right beside me. So I went. I went to Morocco cause it was right beside France. I kept writing in English and in French, all that I was experiencing about the travels.”
Although the book has just been published, Evanson admits she sat on it for the past 20 years.
“I wasn’t really sure what it was or what the value was or what the meaning was, and it took 20 years to see that. I had written at the time about 40% of the manuscript an in 2020. The editor at Vehicle Press approached me because a friend had told him, ‘she’s sitting on a manuscript.’”
Evanson says she’s humbled to be receiving the award, but her motivation has never been money or prizes. She is passionate about the art.
“It really is a lovely surprise, but it’s not why we do the work, or else I would have tried to win prizes 25 years ago. My goal was to express, and it was oral there’s no prizes for oral poets, but I still did it and I will keep expressing.”
She spends her time between Turkey and Montreal. In Turkey, she lives off the grid with her husband in a house they built together. A life she wouldn’t trade for anything.
The New Contribution Literary Prize is awarded jointly by the Blue Metropolis Foundation and the Conseil des arts de Montréal, draws attention to new literary voices from the immigrant community, recognizing contributions that enrich our literature.
The prize is awarded to a first or second-generation immigrant author living in Montreal for their first book or who have published a maximum of three titles.
The prize was presented at the Salon du livre de Montréal at the Palais des congrès. Evanson attended virtually.
