Website: TomsonHighway.ca

Tomson Highway (Cree) is an Indigenous, Two-Spirit, Canadian playwright, novelist, children’s author and musician. He is best known for his plays The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, both of which won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play and the Floyd S. Chalmers Award. Highway also published a novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998), which is based on the events that led to his brother René Highway’s death of AIDS. He wrote the libretto for the first Cree language opera, The Journey or Pimooteewin.

A Selection of Publications

• • Laughing With The Trickster
    Trickster is zany, ridiculous. The ultimate, over-the-top, madcap lunatic. Here to remind us that the reason for existence is to have one blast of a time and to laugh ourselves to death.

• • Permanent Astonishment: A Memoir
    WINNER OF THE 2021 HILARY WESTON WRITERS’ TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION
    Tomson Highway was born in a snowbank on an island in the sub-Arctic, the eleventh of twelve children in a nomadic, caribou-hunting Cree family. Growing up in a land of ten thousand lakes and islands, Tomson relished being pulled by dogsled beneath a night sky alive with stars, sucking the juices from roasted muskrat tails, and singing country music songs with his impossibly beautiful older sister and her teenaged friends. Surrounded by the love of his family and the vast, mesmerizing landscape they called home, his was in many ways an idyllic far-north childhood.

• • The Rez Sisters
    This award-winning play by Native playwright Tomson Highway is a powerful and moving portrayal of seven women from a reserve attempting to beat the odds by winning at bingo. And not just any bingo. It is THE BIGGEST BINGO IN THE WORLD and a chance to win a way out of a tortured life.

• • The (Post) Mistress
    Canada’s most famous Aboriginal playwright, Tomson Highway, sets his latest theatrical achievement, The (Post) Mistress, in a not-so-distant past, when sending letters through the mail was still vital to communicating with friends and loved ones, and the small-town post office was often the only connection to faraway places longed-for or imagined.

Author: Purple Circuit