PhD, University of Cambridge
MA, University of Toronto
BA, University of Toronto
Extension: 46795
Email: stolmie@uwaterloo.ca
Biography
Sarah Tolmie is a Full Professor who was trained as a medievalist at the University of Toronto and Cambridge. She teaches British literature and creative writing. Her research interests are in historiography, visionary poetry, weird fiction and embodiment. She has published articles on Middle English and Scots, particularly on William Langland’s apocalyptic poem The Vision of Piers Plowman.
She is also a poet and speculative fiction writer. Her newest book is the satirical near-future sci-fi Arboretum, forthcoming from Aqueduct Press in spring 2027. It features an abortive human/AI romance, a theme park of genetically reconstructed early humans, and an isolationist enclave of people who call themselves Monopolists. Prior to that was the weird fiction collection Sacraments for the Unfit (Aqueduct, 2023), written during the pandemic and about stay-at-home transformations: e.g., an out-0f-work angel adjusts to his new situation, a medievalist going blind gets into a relationship with the ghost of the codicologist M. R. James, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein begins to send up symbolic objects out of his grave. Her 2022 novella All the Horses of Iceland, a far-traveller saga and ghost story set along the Volga trade route in the ninth century about an Icelander bringing horses home from Mongolia, was named one of the top ten fantasy books of that year by The New York Times and made into an audiobook by Tantor Media.
In 2020, she published the weird short fiction collection Disease, in which people live with painful conditions such as Privacy or Involuntary Compassion, suffer various semiotic allergies, or turn out to be made of glass; the poetry collection Check; and the novella The Fourth Island, set on an imaginary fourth Aran island off the coast of Ireland on which people end up only by passing through the state of despair. Her 2019 novel, The Little Animals, was an alternate history of science starring Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek, the 17th-century Dutch microscopist, and a feral child based on the Goose Girl from the Brothers’ Grimm. Research for this book involved spending five months in the Netherlands, hosted by the Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Utrecht, funded by the Canada Council. It earned a Special Citation at the 2020 Philip K Dick Awards.
Her second collection of poems from McGill-Queen’s, The Art of Dying, was a finalist for the 2018 Griffin Prize, while her first, the sonnet collection Trio, was shortlisted for the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Award in 2016. Her other works of fiction include the two-novella collection Two Travelers, the linked short story collection NoFood, and the novel The Stone Boatmen, shortlisted for the Crawford Award for best debut novel from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts in 2015. Her work has appeared in Year’s Best Canadian Poetry in English, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, The New Quarterly, Grain, Strange Horizons, On Spec, The Malahat Review and The Canadian Literary Review. In 2021, she was one of four women poets chosen to represent Canada in the AR poetry installation Fiery Sparks of Light at the Frankfurt Book Fair, along with Canisia Lubrin, Nicole Brossard and Margaret Atwood.
Events, reviews, samples, and media can be found on her author site at sarahtolmie.ca.
Selected Publications
Arboretum, Aqueduct Press, forthcoming 2027
“Woulds’t thou be in a Dream and yet not sleep?”: Piers Plowman, Gormenghast and the World of Weird Fiction” (Yearbook of Langland Studies 38: Jan. 2024, pp. 123-165)
Sacraments for the Unfit, Aqueduct Press, 2023.
All the Horses of Iceland, Tor.com, 2022.
“Four Poems,” Fiery Sparks of Light, (AR) Telefilm Canada, OCAD, Griffin Trust, 2021.
“Langland, Milton and the Weird Trees: Teaching and Learning Through Piers Plowman and Paradise Lost,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 34 (2020): 177-199.
The Fourth Island, tor.com, October 2020.
Check, McGill-Queen’s University Press, October 2020.
Disease, Aqueduct Press, August 2020.
“Precor,” Carter V Cooper Prize Anthology 9, Exile Editions, August 2020.
The Art of Dying, poetry collection, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2018.
Two Travelers, novellas, Aqueduct Press, Seattle, 2016.
NoFood, short fiction, Aqueduct Press, Seattle, 2014
The Stone Boatmen, novel, Aqueduct Press, Seattle, 2014.
Sonnet in a Blue Dress and Other Poems, chapbook, Baseline Press, London, 2014.
Guest editor, with Randy Harris, of Metaphor and Symbol, special issue on Cognitive Allegory, 2011.
“The Book of the World as I Found It: Langland’s Piers Plowman and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20.4 (2008).
“Langland, Wittgenstein and the Language Game,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 22 (2008).
"The Professional: Thomas Hoccleve,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 341-73.
"Sacrilege, Sacrifice and John Barbour’s Bruce,” International Review of Scottish Studies 32 (2007): 7-32.
"Langland, Wittgenstein and the End of Language,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 20 (2006): 115-39.
"The Priue Scilence of Thomas Hoccleve,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 281-309.
Fellowships & Awards
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2020, Special Citation, Philip K Dick Awards, The Little Animals
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2020, Shortlist for the Carter V Cooper Prize, “Precor”
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2019, Aurora Award for Poem/Song, “Ursula Le Guin in the Underworld”
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2019, Rhysling Award for SF Poetry, “Ursula Le Guin in the Underworld”
- 2015, Canada Council, Mid-Career Writer's Grant for the novel The Little Animals
- 2014, Ontario Arts Council, In-Progress Grant for the novel The Little Animals
- 2014, University of Utrecht, Descartes Centre for the History of Science, Junior Fellowship
- 2012, Ontario Arts Council In-Progress grant for the sonnet sequence Trio.
- 2010-12, Lois Claxton/Robert Hardyng Award, The Salvation Suit.
- 2010-11, SSHRCC Research-Creation Grant, The Salvation Suit, 4A
- 2009-10, SSHRCC Research-Development Grant, The Salvation Suit, 4A
- 2008, Grain Prize, Dramatic Monologue
- 2007, UW Travel Grant
Current Research
A memoir-in-aphorisms, Please Return Before Leaving, is in press. Still working on the sequel to The Stone Boatmen, tentatively titled The Girl and the Bird. Doing preliminary research on data visualization in Piers Plowman, particularly the exploded view.
Areas of Graduate Supervision
- Middle English literature and historiography
- Middle Scots literature and historiography
- Premodern theory of mind and embodiment
- Creative writing
- Cognitive poetics