Barbara Joan Scott

Barbara Joan Scott’s first book, The Quick, won the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and the Howard O’Hagan Award for Best Collection of Short Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Henry Kreisel Award for Best First Book. In 2015 she received the Lois Hole Award for Editorial Excellence. Her essay “Black Diamond” was a finalist for the CBC Non-Fiction Prize in 2023. The Taste of Hunger, her debut novel, received an IPPY Awards Regional Bronze Medal for fiction, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Kobzar Book Award. It was a Quill and Quire Book of the Year for 2022. She lives in Calgary.

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The Taste of Hunger
By Barbara Joan Scott
Published by Freehand Books

A family saga about Ukrainian immigrants in the early 20th century, the power of desire, Baba Yaga fairytales, and a moment that changes everything.

In Saskatchewan in the late 1920s, a fifteen-year-old Ukrainian immigrant named Olena is forced into marriage with Taras, a man twice her age, who wants her even though she has refused him. Stuck in a hardscrabble life and with a husband she despises, starved for a life of her own choosing, at every turn Olena rebels against her husband and her fate. As Olena and Taras drag everyone around them into the maelstrom that is their marriage, they set off a chain of turbulent events whose aftershocks reverberate through generations.

In her novel The Taste of Hunger, Barbara Joan Scott masterfully explores the pull of family, the fallout of thwarted desire, and the power of redemption and forgiveness.