Shani Mootoo was born in Dublin, Ireland, and raised in Trinidad. She came to Canada at the age of nineteen and earned a fine arts degree from the University of Western Ontario in 1980. She established herself as a painter and video producer before turning her talents to writing. With her first novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, Mootoo found a larger audience and established herself as a literary figure to watch. In 2017 she was named co-winner of the the Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize by the Lambda Literary organization. Now living in Prince Edward County, Ontario, Mootoo has returned to non-literary arts but has not abandoned writing, having just published the novel Polar Vortex in the spring of 2020.
Fiction
Cereus Blooms at Night
Vancouver: Press Gang, 1996.
PS8576 .O622 C47 1996
Publisher’s Synopsis (Press Gang Publishers, 1996)
At the core of this haunting multi-generational novel are the shifting faces of Mala — adventurer and protector, recluse and madwoman. Told by Tyler, Mala’s vivacious male caretaker at the Paradise Alms House, the story is layered with unforgettable scenes of a world where love and treachery collide.
Awards and Honours
1997 Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award (formerly Chapters/Books in Canada) (Nominated)
1997 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize (Nominated)
1997 Giller Prize (Nominated)
1997 James Tiptree Jr. Award (Nominated)
Fiction
He Drown She in the Sea
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005.
PS8576 .O622 H4 2005
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.
Set on the fictional Caribbean island of Guanagaspar around the time of the Second World War, and in modern-day Vancouver, He Drown She in the Sea, fulfills the promise of Shani Mootoo’s internationally acclaimed debut novel, Cereus Blooms at Night.
At the centre of the story is Harry St. George, the son of a laundress, and the unrequited love he bears for a woman, Rose, the daughter of a wealthy man, whom he knew as a child. Looking back to his past, evoking the rich culture and texture of his Caribbean boyhood, and the life of his mother, Dolly, Harry reveals his friendship with Rose, and the events that will continue to haunt him across time and place. When Rose arrives suddenly in Vancouver, where Harry has built a hard-earned life for himself, the two embark on an impossible affair that will have tragic consequences.
Fiction
Moving Forward Sidewise Like a Crab
Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2014.
PS8576 .O622 M68 2014
Publisher’s Synopsis
Jonathan Lewis-Adey was nine when his parents, who were raising him in a comfortable house on a tree-lined street in downtown Toronto, separated, and his mother Sid vanished entirely from his life. It is not until he is a grown man–a writer with two books to his name, a supportive girlfriend, and a promising career–that Jonathan finally reconnects with his beloved lost parent, only to find, to his shock and dismay, that the woman he knew as “Sid” has become an elegant man named Sydney living quietly in a well-appointed house in his native Trinidad.
In the nine years since then, Jonathan has travelled from Canada to pay regular visits to Sydney on his island retreat, trying with quiet desperation to rediscover the parent he adored inside this familiar stranger. And for nine years, as his own life and career stall, he struggles to overcome his confusion and repressed anger at the choices Sydney has made. As the novel opens, Jonathan has been summoned urgently to Trinidad where Sydney, now aged and dying, seems at last to offer him the gift he longs for: a winding story that moves forward sideways as it reveals the truths of Sydney’s life. But when and where the story will end is up to Jonathan, and it is he who must decide what to do with Sydney’s haunting legacy of love, loss and acceptance.
Awards and Honours
2015 Lambda Literary Award–Transgender Fiction (Finalist)
Fiction (Short stories)
Out on Main Street & Other Stories
Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1993.
PS8576 .O622 O8 1993
Fiction
Polar Vortex
Toronto: Book*hug Press, 2020.
PS8576.O622 P65 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.
Priya and Alexandra have moved from the city to a picturesque Countryside town. What Alex doesn’t know is that, in moving, Priya is running from her past—from a fraught relationship with an old friend, Prakash, who pursued her for many years, both online and off. Time has passed, however, and Priya, confident that her ties to Prakash have been successfully severed, decides it’s once more safe to establish an online presence. In no time, Prakash finds Priya and contacts her. Impulsively, inexplicably, Priya invites him to visit her and Alex in the country, without ever having come clean with Alex about their relationship—or its tumultuous end. Prakash’s reentry into Priya’s life reveals cracks in her and Alex’s relationship and brings into question Priya’s true intentions.
Are we ever free from our pasts? Can we ever truly know the people we are closest to? Seductive and tension-filled, Polar Vortex is a story of secrets, deceptions, and revenge
Awards and Honours
2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize (finalist)
Fiction
Valmiki’s Daughter
Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2008.
PS8576 .O622 V35 2008
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 story circles around a well-to-do Trinidadian family, in particular, Valmiki, a renowned doctor and loving if confused father, and his youngest daughter, Viveka, lively, intelligent, and intent on escaping the gilded cage that protects but also smothers her. Father and daughter conceal painful secrets about their sexual identities, and it is Viveka’s struggle to discover the truth about herself that threatens to unmask her father and shake the foundations of her family and her delicately calibrated society.
Poetry
Cane / Fire: Poems
Toronto: Book*hug Press, 2022.
PS8576.O622 C36 2022
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Throughout this evocative, sensual collection, akin to a poetic memoir, past and present are in conversation with each other as the narrator moves from Ireland to San Fernando, and finally to Canada. The reinterpretations and translation of this journey and its associated family history give meaning to the present. Through these deeply personal poems, and Mootoo’s own artwork, we begin to understand how a life can not only be shaped, but even reimagined.
Poetry
Oh Witness Dey!
Toronto: Book*hug Press, 2024.
forthcoming spring 2024
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Shani Mootoo’s great-great-grandparents were brought to Trinidad as indentured labourers by the British. There is no record of where they were from in India or whether it was kidnapping, trickery, or false promises of wealth that took them to the Caribbean.
In Oh Witness Dey! Mootoo expands the question of origins, from ancestry percentages and journey narratives, through memory, story, and lyric fragments. These vibrant poems transcend the tropes of colonial violence through saints and spices, rebellion and joy, to reimagine tensions and solidarities among various diasporas. They circumvent traditional conventions of style to find new routes toward understanding. They invite the reader to witness history, displacements and the legacies of our inheritance.
Poetry
The Predicament of Or
Vancouver: Polestar, 2001.
PS8576 .O622 P73 2001
Publisher’s Synopsis (Polestar, 2001)
In haunting and astonishing language, shot through with the speech and rhythms of Trinidad, Mootoo walks a breathtaking tightrope–between cultures and identities, between geographical locations, between memory and desire.
Anthology
Cross-Dressed Caribbean: Writing, Politics, Sexualities
Mootoo, Shani. “On Becoming an Indian Starboy.” In Cross-Dressed Caribbean: Writing, Politics, Sexualities, edited by Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Bénédicte Ledent, and Roberto del Valle Alcalá. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013, 167-172.
Anthology
Desire in Seven Voices
Mootoo, Shani. “Photo Parentheses.” In Desire in Seven Voices , edited by Lorna Crozier. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1999, 105-124.
Anthology
Trinidad Noir
Mootoo, Shani. “The Funeral Party.” In Trinidad Noir, edited by Lisa Allen-Agostini & Jeanne Mason. New York: Akashic Books, 2008, 52-71.
Anthology
Writing Life
Mootoo, Shani. “Poetry Lesson .” In Writing Life: Celebrated Canadian and International Authors on Writing and Life, edited by Constance Rooke. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006, 288-296.
Selected Criticism and Interpretation
Brüning, Angela. “The Corporeal and the Sensual in Two Novels by Shani Mootoo and Julia Alvarez.” In Beyond the Blood, the Beach & the Banana: New Perspectives in Caribbean Studies, edited by Sandra Courtman. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2004.
F2175 .B49 2004
Choudhuri, Sucheta Mallick. “Transgressive Territories: Queer Space in Indian Fiction and Film.” Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 2009.
Corr, John. “Diasporic Sexualities in Contemporary Canadian Fiction.” Ph.D. diss., McMaster University, 2007.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Cummings, Ronald Bancroft. “Queer Marronage and Caribbean Writing.” PhD diss., University of Leeds, 2012.
Available soon from White Rose E-theses Online
Datta-Kimball, Shompaballi. “Post-colonial Re-presentations of Gendered Diasporic Indian Identity in the Fictions of Suniti Namjoshi and Shani Mootoo.” Ph.D. diss., University of Alabama, 2004.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Donnell, Alison. “Living and Loving: Emancipating the Queer Caribbean Citizen in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night.” In Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean, edited by Faith Smith. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011.
PN849 .C3 S49 2011
Ferrante, Allyson Salinger. “Emperors of Invisible Cities: The Sovereignty of the Imagination in Caribbean Literature.” Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 2011.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Fox, Linda Christine. “Queer Outburst: A Literary and Social Analysis of the Vancouver Node (1995-1996) in English Canadian Queer Women’s Literature.” Ph.D. diss., University of Victoria, 2009.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Gagnon, Monika Kin. “Out in the Garden: Shani Mootoo’s Xerox Works.” In Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2000, 146-155.
N6549.3 .G34 2000
Gopinath, Gayatri. “Queer Diasporas: Gender, Sexuality and Migration in Contemporary South Asian Literature and Cultural Production.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1998.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Also 7th floor HQ76.25 .G67 2005 “Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: Funny Boy and Cereus Blooms at Night“, chap. in Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queering Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University, 2005), 161-186.
Hong, Kyungwon. “The Histories of the Propertyless: The Literatures of United States Women of Color.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 2000.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Howells, Coral Ann . “Changing Boundaries of Identity: Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night.” In Contemporary Canadian Women’s Fiction: Refiguring Identities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
PS8089.5 .W6 H67 2003
Iovannone, Jeffry J. “Transperformance: Transgendered Reading Strategies, Contemporary American Literature.” M.A. thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2006.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Kaleel, Rhonda A. “An Ecocritical and Metaphorical Analysis of “Cereus Blooms at Night”.” M.A. thesis, Florida Atlantic University, 2005.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Kandiuk, Mary. “Shani Mootoo.” In Caribbean and South Asian Writers in Canada: A Bibliography of Their Works and of English-language Criticism. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2007, 94-97.
PS8089.5 .C37 K36 2007
Khan, Aliyah R. “”Calling the Magician”: The Metamorphic Indo-Caribbean.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 2012.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Available as an open access dissertation from http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/8p63v91p
Kim, Christine. “Troubling the Mosaic: Larissa Lai’s When Fox is a Thousand, Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, and Representations of Social Differences.” Chap. in Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography, eds. Eleanor Ty and Christl Verduyn. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008, 153-178.
PS8089.5 .A8 A84 2008
Kyser, Kristina. “Tides of Belonging: Reconfiguring the Autoethnographic Paradigm in Shani Mootoo’s He Drown She in the Sea.” Chap. in Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography, eds. Eleanor Ty and Christl Verduyn. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008, 71-86.
PS8089.5 .A8 A84 2008
Layne, Prudence. “Towards and Erotics of Hybridity: Bodies at the Crossroads of a Nation.” Ph.D. diss., University of Miami, 2004.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
McKeown, Judith Antoinette Jeannette. “Si(gh)t[e]-ing and (Re)writing Home(lessness): African and Indian Caribbean Women En/gendering Multiple Migratory Identifications in Canada.” M.A. thesis, York University, 2005.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Morgan, Paula. “From a Distance: Territory, Subjectivity, and Identity Construction in Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night.” In Caribbean Literature in a Global Context, ed. Funso Aiyejina & Paula Morgan. San Juan, Trinidad & Tobago: Lexicon Trinidad, 2006, 104-130.
PR9210 .A515 C37 2006
Morguson, Alisun. “All the Pieces Matter: Fragmentation-as-Agency in the Novels of Edwidge Danticat, Michelle Cliff, and Shani Mootoo.” M.A. thesis, University of Indiana, 2013. Accessed August 30, 2013.
Available as an open access thesis from http://hdl.handle.net/1805/3218
Mootoo, Shani. “Shani Mootoo”. Interview by Kofi Omoniyi Sylvanus Campbell. In his The Queer Caribbean Speaks: Interviews with Writers, Artists, and Activists. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, [135]-145.
PR9205.4 .C36 2014
Neti, Leila Bhanu. “Dialogues Across Diasporas: Postcolonial Continuities in Literatures of the Global South.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 2006.
Palmer, Paulina. “Place and Space.” Chap. in her The Queer Uncanny: New Perspectives on the Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012, 105-151.
PR830 .T3 P35 2012
Pecic, Zoran. “Shani Mootoo’s Diasporas.” Chap. in his Queer Narratives of the Caribbean Diaspora: Exploring Tactics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 36-101.
PN849 .C3 P43 2013
Phukan, Atreyee. “East Indianness in the West Indies: Representations of Post-indentureship in Indo-Trinidadian Literature.” Ph.D. diss., Rutgers The State University of New Jersey – New Brunswick, 2006.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Pirbhai, Mariam. “An Ethnos of Difference, a Praxis of Inclusion: The Ethics of Global Citizenship in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night.” Chap. in Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography, eds. Eleanor Ty and Christl Verduyn. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008, 247-266.
PS8089.5 .A8 A84 2008
Reid, Mary. “”Nowhere if not Here”: The Ethics of Queer Experimentation in the Global Novel Form.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 2012.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Sarbadhikary, Krishna. “Imaginary Landscapes, Permeable Borders: Shani Mootoo.” In Surviving the Fracture: Writers of the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2007, 237-271.
PS8089.5 .S68 S37 2007
Sarnelli, Laura. “Poetics of Memory and Migration: Shani Mootoo’s The Predicament of Or and Out on Main Street.” In The Expatriate Indian Writing in English. Vol. 1, ed. T. Vinoda and P. Shailaja. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 2006, 209-223.
PR9489.6 .E96 2006 v.1
Shani Mootoo: My Dinner With Shani
Produced and directed by Frances-Anne Solomon. 24. min. Leda Serene Films, 2005.
Audio-visual PS8576 .O622 Z75 2005
Singh, Jaspal Kaur, “Queering Diaspora in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, Nisha Ganatra’s Chutney Popcorn, and Deepa Mehta’s Fire.” In her Representation and Resistance: South Asian and African Women’s Texts at Home and in the Diaspora. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2008, 163-176.
PN56.5 .W64 S563 2008
Sudhakar, Anantha. “Conditional Futures: South Asian American Cultural Production and Community Formation, 1991–2001.” Ph.D. diss., Rutgers The State University of New Jersey – New Brunswick, 2011.
Available as an open access dissertation from http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10001600001.ETD.000061528
Tagore, Proma. “Witnessing as Testimony: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eyes and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night.” Chap. in her The Shapes of Silence: Writing by Women of Colour and, the Politics of Testimony. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.
PN471 .T33 2009
Taylor, Emily L. “Rewriting the Mother/Nation: No Telephone to Heaven, In Another Place, Not Here and Cereus Blooms at Night.” Chap. in The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, ed. Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.
PR9205 .R68 2011
Urbistondo, Josune. “Caribbean Bodyscapes: The Politics of Sacred Citizenship and the Transpersonal Body.” Ph.D. diss., University of Miami, 2012.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Villarini, Juan M Salome. “Male Monstrosity or Failed Masculinity? Shani Mootoo’s Literary Oeuvre.” In Confluences 3: Essays on the New Canadian Literature, ed. Dannabang Kuwabong. Toronto: Mawenzi House, 2021.
PS8117 .C66 2021
Wall, Natalie. “Mixing in the Postcolonial Diaspora: Writing Race as fiction in the Works of Lawrence Hill, Shani Mootoo, and Danzy Senna.” M.A. thesis, University of Calgary, 2009.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Links
Shani Mootoo portrait and biographical note from ArQuives National Portrait Gallery
Publisher Book*hug Press
Publisher House of Anansi Press
Publisher Penguin Random House Canada
Publisher McClelland and Stewart
Interview with Daniel Perry of the Brockton Writers Series July 3, 2013
Author Profile by Shazia Hafiz Ramji in Quill & Quire website, 27 April 2022
Shani Mootoo Fonds at Simon Fraser University Library