Charlotte Gill was born to an Indian father and English mother in London, UK and raised in the United States and Canada. She is an award winning writer of non-fiction and fiction. Gill teaches in the MFA programme in creative nonfiction at University of King’s College. Gill lives on the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia. Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree-planting Tribe was a best seller in Canada and won the BC National Award for Non-fiction. Her short story “Hush” was a finalist for the 2003 Journey Prize Award. The story is included in Ladykiller.
Fiction
Ladykiller: Stories
Toronto: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2005.
PS8613.I435 L33 2005
Synopsis
Ladykiller is the astonishing debut collection of seven smart stories from an exciting new voice in Canadian literature. Charlotte Gill is a brilliant young writer who is not afraid to stare down the truth and shame the devil. She conjures compelling stories about escape, self-sabotage, and the power of unconscious desire. A couple plots against a crying baby in the apartment below as their dysfunctional relationship begins to veer off course. A hot-shot scuba-diving instructor falls for a teenaged girl in a perilous Lolita-like romance. Twin sisters travel to exotic lands in search of romance in order to rescue themselves from their own dark, intense bond. A woman reconnects with the son of her father’s mistress, and together they begin an obsession with the past. A medical student embarks on an affair with a professor and discovers revolution in disastrous consequences. An unfaithful man takes his girlfriend to his ailing mother’s for Christmas, only to find himself at the crossroads of sexual impulse and mortality.
Awards and Honours
2005 Danuta Gleed Literary Award (Winner)
2005 Governor General’s Literary Awards–English Language Fiction (Finalist)
Non-fiction (Memoir)
Almost Brown: A Mixed-race Family Memoir
Toronto: Viking Canada, 2023.
HT1523 .G535 2023
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Almost Brown is an exploration of diasporic intermingling involving two deeply eccentric parents from worlds apart and their half-brown children as they experience the paradoxes and conundrums of life as it’s lived between race checkboxes. Their intercultural experiment features turbans and tube socks, chana masala and Cherry Coke, feminist uprisings, racial alliances and divides, a divorce, multiple grudges, and plenty of bad fashion. The family implodes, but after twenty years of silence, father and daughter reclaim a space for forgiveness and love.