About This Year's Book

Drew Hayden Taylor's Motorcycles and Sweetgrass.

Drew Hayden Taylor’s national bestseller, Motorcycles and Sweetgrass, which was nominated for the Governor General’s award for fiction, shows us nanabush, a major figure in native mythology, as a forgotten old drunk in Toronto who receives a spiritual call from a grandmother on a native reserve. He arrives as a handsome white man on a motorcycle and starts charming the women, especially the chief. Her son is suspicious of the newcomer and enlists his hermit, martial artist uncle to help solve the mystery. This isn’t the worst of Nanabush’s problems; an age-old feud with the raccoons resurfaces, and they try to undermine him every chance they get. Robert J. Wiersema of the Edmonton Journal describes the book as “A broad, bawdy, raucous, deeply felt and utterly involving narrative…[that] positively crackles with life, love and magic.”

About the Author

An Ojibway from the Curve Lake First Nations, Drew Hayden Taylor has worn many hats in his literary career, from performing stand-up comedy at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., to lecturing at the British Museum on the films of Sherman Alexie. Over the last two decades, he has been an award-winning playwright (with over seventy productions of his work), a journalist/columnist (with a column in several newspapers across the country), short-story writer, novelist and scriptwriter (The Beachcombers, North of Sixty, etc.), and has worked on seventeen documentaries exploring the Native experience. In 2007, Annick Press published his first children's novel, The Night Wanderer: A Native Gothic Novel, a teen story about an Ojibway vampire. Last year, his non-fiction book exploring the world of Native sexuality, called Me Sexy, was published by Douglas & McIntyre. It is a follow-up to his highly successful book on Native humour, Me Funny.