DAWN PROMISLOW
WRITER
Some reviews:
From Jewish Fiction
From The Miramichi Reader.
From Berfrois
From CJN (Canadian Jewish News) (review on page 16 of the Summer 2022 issue)
From Great Dark Wonder
From ESRA Magazine, Israel's English-language bi-monthly magazine (review on page 83 of the July 2022 issue)
From The Quarantine Review (download pdf and see page 15)
Why I wrote this book in The Miramichi Reader
Interview about Wan in WordCity Journal
Interview in All Lit Up
Interview on Nathan Whitlock's podcast, "What Happened Next"
Events:
**Eden Mills Writers' Festival, September 11, 2022
**On a panel at Word on the Street, June 11, 2022 at 12 noon
**In conversation with Cathy Tile, Classi Learning, February 9, 2023
**Beth Tzedec Book and Film Club, March 22, 2023
**Books and Biscotti, Temple Emanu-El, Toronto, March 30, 2023
And: are you a member of a Book Club? Wan has been doing the rounds of a number of book clubs. Here is a Discussion Guide for Wan for anyone who wishes to download and use.
If you'd like me to visit your book club, either in person or online, drop me a line!
Below: Toronto studio on March 6, 2025, recording audiobook of Wan. The audiobook will be out on all platforms soon!
Wan, a novel
**Finalist: Fred Kerner Book Award 2023**
**Finalist: Alberta Book Publishing Award 2023 (for design)**
"A brilliant portrait of a white liberal South African artist during apartheid....The novel [Wan] is a blood diamond, whose beauty is inseparable from its provenance."
—Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, author of No Place Strange
One of 22 Best Fiction titles of 2022 in The Miramichi Reader
A CanLit Bookclub Pick in Zoomer magazine
One of CBC Books's 24 Holiday recommendations for historical fiction, Xmas 2022
One of CBC Books's 15 historical fiction titles to read this summer.
One of CBC Books's most anticipated titles for May
One of CBC Books's titles to watch in their spring 2022 preview.
One of 49th Shelf's most anticipated Spring 2022 fiction titles.
A South African woman, an artist, unravels after an anti-apartheid activist, hiding from the police, moves into her garden house.
The story grapples with questions of complicity and guilt, of privilege, and of the value of art and of life.
Praise for Wan
“Wan is a masterpiece. This beautiful, painterly, sublime, and sonically exquisite novel by Dawn Promislow is a work of utter genius.”
—Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of All the Broken Things
"Dawn Promislow's first novel, Wan, fulfils the promise of her short story collection, Jewels. Its protagonist is, like all compelling characters, much too complicated to be labelled. Instead, she embodies the unavoidably tainted legacy of white South Africans, including those who resisted apartheid. Deceptively subtle, its facets razor-sharp, this jewel of a novel is a blood diamond whose beauty is inseparable from its provenance.
—Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, author of No Place Strange
"...A remarkable exploration of the consciousness of a particular woman in a particular place at a particular time. The idiosyncratic cadence of the prose, with its ill-defined sentences, comma splices, and repetitions, traps the reader inside Jacqueline's mind, the way she is trapped by circumstance and her own limitations. Wan creates a suffocating world, in which the reader can barely breathe, a fine evocation of apartheid South Africa. And the way [the author] creates a vivid sexual tension, without the barest hint of sex, is masterful.
...I should add that the book, like all great books, also transcends its time and place. There is a bit of Jacqueline in all white, or even possibly all upper middle class people, everywhere on earth."
—Karen Shenfeld, poet and film-maker
"A stunning, compelling read, Dawn Promislow’s first novel belongs to the literature of witness — an eloquent portrayal of a white South African woman in the apartheid era, one which speaks with a universal voice to our present moment. The author captures Jacqueline’s quiet but acute unease, as she and her husband negotiate a perilous world, the courage it asks of them, and the catastrophe that follows. This is riveting work, courageous and honest, written with moral engagement and deep reflection."
—Carole Giangrande, author of The Tender Birds and All That is Solid Melts Into Air
"A very still but articulate woman speaks with great precision about her privileged life in apartheid South Africa. But the stillness is an illusion. Beneath her calm voice, political pressure is building and sexual tension is rising. The atmosphere in this...powerful novel is the literary equivalent of the highly charged atmosphere you feel before a major storm. I couldn't put this book down."
—Antanas Sileika, author of Provisionally Yours
"This exquisite novel insists on being read at the pace of its narrator's voice. An insistence I gave into like a warm spring, heated by the relentless tectonic shifts taking place beneath the surface."
—Darcie Friesen Hossack, Commonwealth Writers Prize shortlisted author of Mennonites Don't Dance
ON SALE MAY 1, 2022
The book can be purchased from the publisher, Freehand Books, from your local independent bookstore, such as this one (or any other!), or from Chapters/Indigo and Amazon in Canada, or Amazon in the US or overseas, or Amazon UK, or order from bookstores in the UK, such as this one (or any other). Public libraries across Canada also have the book and if they don't in your city/district, do ask them to acquire it!
And: Update, March 8, 2025, audiobook of Wan on the way, narrated by...me!
