MG Vassanji
Canada
M G Vassanji is the author of ten novels, three collections of short stories, a travel memoir about India, a memoir of East Africa, and a biography of Mordecai Richler. He is twice winner of the Giller Prize (1994, 2003) for best work of fiction in Canada among receiving other awards. His work has been translated into Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, and Swahili. Vassanji has given lectures worldwide and written many essays, including introductions to the works of Robertson Davies, Anita Desai, and Mordecai Richler, and the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi. In June 2015, MG Vassanji was awarded the Canada Council Molson Prize for the Arts.
M G Vassanji was born in Nairobi, Kenya and raised in Tanzania. He received a BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, before going to live in Canada. He is a member of the Order of Canada. He lives in Toronto, and visits East Africa and India often.
(Source: author’s website)
What you can't miss:
Can we ever truly belong in this new home? Did we ever truly belong in the home we left? Where exactly do we belong? For many, the answer is nowhere exactly. Combining brilliant prose, thoughtful, candid observation, and a lifetime of exploring how we as individuals are shaped by the places and communities in which we live and the history that haunts them, Nowhere, Exactly examines with exquisite sensitivity the space between identity and belonging, the immigrant experience of both loss and gain, and the weight of memory and nostalgia, guilt and hope felt by so many of those who leave their homes in search of new ones.
In this travel memoir the author revisits the cities of his birth and growing up and over several journeys travels the length and breadth of the land--from Dar es Salaam to Mbeya, Zanzibar to Nairobi, Kilwa to Kigoma... "For a long time it seemed to me that I would never visit those lost dimensions, experience the land in its variety, experience the diversity of its people. I was wrong. All it required was the will to do just that... There were moments when the thrill of travel and discovery were such that I felt I could go on and on, from place to place, and never stop.
Reviews:
Vikram Lall, the grandchild of an Indian railroad worker, comes of age in 1950s Kenya. Against the unsettling backdrop of Mau Mau violence and the country's struggle for independence, Vic and his sister Deepa search for their place in a world sharply divided between Kenyans and the British.
Reviews:
India Today
The New Yorker
In historic Kilwa, on the coast of Tanzania, Kamal Punja is the "dark Indian" boy, son of an Indian father who absconded and an African mother; his playmate Saida is the granddaughter of a famous Swahili poet who narrates the history of the country through his epic verses. They seem destined for each other, until Kamal is sent away. In middle age, Kamal returns to Kilwa to search for his childhood sweetheart. What he finds is a nightmarish legacy of his broken promise. A story of love, exile and return, embedded in a culture where history is all around, and magic and poetry are the stuff of everyday life.
Reviews:
The Globe and Mail
Washington Independent Review of Books
