Sarah Henstra on her 2018 novel The Red Word

Sarah Henstra is a professor of English literature at Ryerson University in Toronto where she teaches courses in Gothic Horror, Fairy Tales & Fantasies, Psychoanalysis & Literature, and Creative Writing. She is the author of The Red Word , a novel that recently won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. We met in Ottawa to talk about The Red Word . Among other things we discuss The Scarlet Letter , shame, the double standard, Greek mythology, unspoken assumptions, #metoo, feminism, frats houses, university life, the 1990s, passive characters and withholding sex.