Writers
Shani Mootoo was born in Ireland and raised in Trinidad, relocating to Canada in her early twenties.
She writes fiction and poetry. Her novels include Polar Vortex, Cereus Blooms at Night, Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab, and Valmiki’s Daughter. She is a four-time Scotiabank Giller Prize nominee, whose work has been shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and longlisted for the Booker Prize.
Her poetry collections include The Predicament of Or, Cane | Fire and, most recently, Oh Witness Dey! Of the latter, Kim Fahner writes in Periodicities, August 2024, “The craft, in all her poetry, is clear, and the great amount of thought and care that’s put into deciding where lines begin and end, and where they dance across the page—or even when the font changes in size—is poetic architecture of the highest order.”
Mootoo has been awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa from Western University. She is a recipient of Lambda Literary’s James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, and the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award and has been named a Library and Archives Canada Scholar. Mootoo’s papers are held at Simon Fraser University’s Bennet Library. Her work has been translated into several languages.
She lives in Southern Ontario.