Joan Thomas

Joan Thomas (born 1949) is a Canadian novelist and book reviewer from Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Biography Thomas grew up in Carberry, Manitoba and later worked as a freelance journalist and book reviewer for The Globe and Mail, the Winnipeg Free Press and Prairie Fire, and as a book editor for Turnstone Press. She won a National Magazine Award in 1996 for her journalism.

Thomas's debut novel Reading by Lightning won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Canada/Caribbean) as well as the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.

Her second novel, Curiosity, was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. Both novels were longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award.

Her third novel The Opening Sky (2014) was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Carol Shields Book Award, and the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. It won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, and was named a CBC book of the year.

In 2014, Thomas was awarded the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award for a mid-career writer.

In 2019, her novel Five Wives won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction.