Sarah Tolmie

Sarah Tolmie, a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo, is a traditionally-trained, philologically-oriented medievalist with a master's degree from the University of Toronto and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her research interests are in historiography, visionary poetry and embodiment. She has published articles on Middle English and Scots literature, as well as on Langland's Piers Plowman. 

A poet and speculative fiction writer, Sarah has authored multiple works including The Art of Dying (2018); the 120-sonnet sequence Trio (2015); novels The Little Animals (2019)and The Stone Boatmen (2014); and short fiction collections Disease (2020), Two Travelers (2016), and NoFood (2014). In 2020 she published three books, The New Weird short fiction collection Disease, the poetry collection Check, and the novella The Fourth Island. Her newest work All the Horses of Iceland is anticipated in 2022.

The Little Animals earned the Special Citation at the 2020 Philip K Dick Awards, The Art of Dying was a finalist for the 2018 Griffin Prize, and Trio was shortlisted for the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Award in 2016. The Stone Boatmen was shortlisted for the Crawford Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts in 2015. Her creative work has also appeared in Year’s Best Canadian Poetry in English, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, The New Quarterly, Grain, Strange Horizons, On Spec, TheMalahatReview and The Canadian Literary Review.