Through a series of alternating short prose, poems and illustrations, the Inuk narrator recollects aspects of growing up in a small Nunavut town in the 1970s. At 43 years old in 2018 when Split Tooth, Tagaq's first and only book was published, she had already released four studio albums and was appointed to be a Member of the Order of Canada. Tagaq was raised in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, and attended high school in Yellowknife before finding success in Toronto performing Inuit throat singing. Split Tooth was written by Tanya Tagaq based on journal entries, poems, and short stories that she had written over the previous 20 years. The novel was also longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Amazon.ca First Novel Award. The book won the Indigenous Voices Award for English Prose in 2019. Characterized by the publisher as magic realism, it has also been characterized as an example of Daniel Heath Justice's critical concept of "wonderworks" or literature by Indigenous writers that defies conventional Western notions of literary genres. The book has been described as a blend of fiction, memoir, poetry and Inuit folklore. Based in part on her own personal journals, the book tells the story of a young Inuk woman growing up in the Canadian Arctic in the 1970s. Split Tooth is a 2018 novel by Canadian musician Tanya Tagaq.
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