Coursework Assignment 1: Author Profile (Shani Mootoo) Shani MootooShani Mootoo was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1958 and raised in Trinidad. At age nineteen she migrated

Shani began her literary career with a collection of short fiction, entitled ‘Out on Main Street’, published in 1993 to fantastic reviews, further exploring the common theme in every work she creates, triumphing over childhood abuse.  Her second book, ‘Cereus Blooms at Night’ published in 1996 in Canada was her first novel and one of her paintings appears on the cover.  

Mootoo's experience as a multiple migrant and an individual, whose family has traversed the cultures of India, Ireland, England and Trinidad - and as an immigrant in Canada, emerge as central themes in her work.  She focuses on issues of authenticity and identity in most of her written works.  She exposes the uncertainty of the hybrid individual and explores a variety of situations in which her characters are pressed to display a prescribed cultural authenticity both by individuals putatively from within the same culture and from those who are clearly outsiders.

Since her initiation into the literary world she has written a collection of poetry, ‘The Predicament of Or’.  She also spent a good deal of time mentoring aspiring authors as the 2002 Faculty of Arts writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta. She reviewed manuscripts, provided advice for students and faculty as well as anyone in the wider community interested in developing their craft.

She is currently a contribution editor for CBC Radio's "This Morning".  Mootoo divides her time between Vancouver and New York City and is working on her second novel tentatively called "The Woman Who Gave Love Birds for a Present."

Major Works

Mootoo, Shani.  “Out on Main Street”.  Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1993.

Mootoo, Shani.  “Cereus Blooms at Night”.  Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1996.

Mootoo, Shani.  “The Predicament of Or”.  Raincoast Books, September, 2001.

Selected Bibliography

The home pages of Press Gang Publishers:  

An on-line review of Cereus Blooms at Night:  

Ghosh, Dipti.  "Baigan Aloo Tabanka Bachanal: Writer, Artist, Filmmaker Shani Mootoo in Her Own Words," trikone magazine, 1994, vol.9 (4): 5-6.

Smyth, Heather.  “Sexual citizenship and Caribbean-Canadian fiction”

Brand, Dionne. “In Another Place, Not Here” 

Ariel, a Review of International English Literature. April 1999: 141-160.

Yang, June Unjoo. "Dramas of Diaspora." Women’s Review of Books. May 1999: 11.