Jean Marc Ah-Sen was born in East York, Toronto, Ontario and continues to live in Toronto. He is descended from a family of winemakers on the island nation Mauritius located in the Indian Ocean.
Fiction
Grand Menteur
Toronto: Book Thug, 2015.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Ma misses the sun, warmth and colors of their faraway homeland, but her daughter sees magic in everything — the clouds in the winter sky, the “firework” display when she throws an armful of snow into the air, making snow angels, tasting snowflakes. And in the end, her joy is contagious. Home is where family is, after all.
The secret world of Mauritian street gangs is not for the faint of heart. Fraught with peril and mischief, its inner workings are a mystery to the daughter of one of its most valued members: Serge, the Grand Menteur. A liar of exceptional caliber whose sole responsibility is to purposefully confuse police with alibis, the Menteur fears for the criminal future he has unwittingly introduced into his daughter’s life, when her clear knack for violence attracts the notice of senior gang members.
Mauritian Kreol, English, and French blend together into a heady brew of language in Grand Menteur. Written in a nuanced style reflecting the island-nation’s convoluted history of colonialism, this debut novel by Jean Marc Ah-Sen sheds an unflinching light on the poverty and down-and-out hardship of a shadow class of immigrants from the 1940s to the ’80s.
Awards and Honours
2015 Globe and Mail Top 100 Books
Fiction
In the Beggarly Style of Imitation
Gibsons, BC: Nightwood Editions, 2020.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Ma misses the sun, warmth and colors of their faraway homeland, but her daughter sees magic in everything — the clouds in the winter sky, the “firework” display when she throws an armful of snow into the air, making snow angels, tasting snowflakes. And in the end, her joy is contagious. Home is where family is, after all.
Born on the twin backs of torpidity and obsession, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation is a voyage into the mind of one of the Canadian literary underground’s most unruly writers. Equal parts tribute to the historical genesis of the novel and the well-trodden subject of love, the exercises of imitation contained in this collection offer a brief survey through the illustrious forms and genres of literary expression: epistolary, aphorism, essay, picaresque, romance and satire culminate in a celebratory brand of fiction that proves with finality that imitation is truly the vilest form of flattery.
Awards and Honours
2020 Toronto Book Awards (Finalist)
Fiction
Kilworthy Tanner: A Novel
Montreal: Esplanade Books, 2024.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Fresh-faced Jonno is looking to make a splash in the literary scene when he encounters celebrated novelist Kilworthy Tanner at a party. Having sold first editions of her works to Toronto’s book dealers, he’s immediately star-struck and more than a little surprised when she takes an interest in him. Could this be the break he’s after? It’s not long before the controlling and aloof Kilworthy is casually letting young Jonno move in with her, and they begin co-authoring sensational and unruly fictions together. But who’ll get the credit for these collaborations, and why does he constantly feel like he must fend off rival authors? Fuelled by outrageousness and hell-bent on literary self-annihilation, Kilworthy Tanner is Jonno’s tell-all ‘pseudobiography’ of their entanglement, and he doesn’t withhold any details of the sexual degeneracy, prodigious drug use, and vendettas of the era.
Anthology (Fiction, Novellas)
Dead Writers: Stories
Co-authors: Michael LaPointe, Cassidy McFadzean, & Naben Ruthnum
Picton, ON: Invisible Publishers, 2025.
E-book (Access restricted to members of the university community)
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
In this collaborative fiction project, four writers navigate the protean concept of the “bargain” in novella-length stories. A biographer surveying the career of a “haunted” literary figure, a lovelorn journalist entering into a diabolic covenant, a tourist attempting to stay sober through her holiday travels, and a doctor’s complicity in a colonial scandal: These horror-inflected offerings of existential dread, tainted pasts, and uncertain futures serve as an unbalancing reminder that there is always a high price to pay for the corruption of the soul.
Anthology (Fiction, Novellas)
Disintegration in Four Parts
Co-authors: Emily Anglin, Devon Code, Lee Henderson.
Toronto: Coach House Books, 2021.
E-book (Access restricted to members of the university community)
Links
Jean Marc Ah-Sen Facebook page
Publisher Book*hug Press
Publisher Coach House Books
Publisher Esplanade Books, an imprint of Véhicule Press
Publisher Invisible Publishing
Publisher Nightwood Editions