Tanya Tagaq

Experimental vocalist and artist Tanya Tagaq won the Polaris Prize for best Canadian album in 2014, for Animism. Those who thought she had then made her definitive artistic statement are in for a surprise. Also in for a shock are those who thought international success, playing to major festivals and packed houses all over the world, would lead to a mellower sound, or a more laid back approach. Tagaq follows up Animism with Retribution, an even more musically aggressive, more aggressively political, more challenging, more spine tingling, more powerful masterpiece. In addition to her musical performance, Tanya will talk about her new book Split Tooth, which folds memoir with fiction, traditional stories with reality, and poetry with prose. It is the story of a girl growing up in the Nunavut of the 1970s. Dark and rapturous, Split Tooth does with words what Tagaq’s music often does without, sweeping the reader into a space where life’s artificial constructs hold no claim.