M. G. Vassanji was born in Nairobi, Kenya but raised in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He earned a BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a PhD in nuclear physics from the University of Pennsylvania before coming to Canada in 1978. Vassanji is the founding editor of the literary magazine The Toronto South Asian Review. Renamed and with a broader scope as The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad, the magazine gave voice to immigrant Canadians. TSAR Publications began publishing monographs in 1985 and transitioned in 2015 to Mawenzi House Publishers. Vassanji and his family reside in Toronto. In February, 2005, Vassanji was named a Member of the Order of Canada for his contribution to arts/writing. Vassanji was the winner of the 2015 Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize for contribution to the arts in Canada. Vassanji’s non-fiction work includes a biography of novelist Mordecai Richler, and the editing of A Meeting of Stream: South Asian Canadian Literature, a volume of articles and essays that grew out of the proceedings of the Conference on South Asian Canadian Literature on October 1-3, 1983, organized by the Toronto South Asian review.
Fiction
Amriika
Toronto: M&S, 1999.
Toronto: M&S, 2000. (Pbk. ed.)
PS8593.A87 A47 1999
Publisher’s Synopsis (M&S ,1999)
[This is] a remarkable novel of personal and political awakening that spans three decades and explores the eternal quest for home. It is a quintessentially North American novel, told from the point of view of a man from Dar es Salaam, East Africa.
In 1968, Ramji, a student, arrives in an America far different from the one he dreamed about, one caught up in anti-war demonstrations, revolutionary lifestyles, and spiritual quests. As he gradually grows apart from his community of foreign students, Ramji finds himself pulled by the tumultuous currents of the times … . Much later, with his marriage faltering, and living a suburban life in a changed America, he meets a young woman from Zanzibar, and feels that a different, more authentic life is possible — until a mysterious visitor from Ramji’s past arrives in their midst.
Fiction
The Assassin’s Song
Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2007.
PS8593 .A87 A88 2007
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
M.G. Vassanji’s magnificent new novel provides further proof of his unique, wide ranging and profound genius. The Assassin’s Song is a shining study of the conflict between ancient loyalties and modern desires, a conflict that creates turmoil the world over – and it is at once an intimate portrait of one man’s painful struggle to hold the earthly and the spiritual in balance. In The Assassin’s Song, Karsan Dargawalla tells the story of the medieval Sufi shrine of Pirbaag, and his betrayal of its legacy. But Karsan’s conflicted attempt to settle accounts quickly blossoms into a layered tale that spans centuries: from the mysterious Nur Fazal’s spiritual journeys through thirteenth century India, to his shrine’s eventual destruction in the horrifying “riots” of 2002.
Awards and Honours
2007 Governor General’s Literary Award–English–Fiction (Shortlist)
2007 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (Finalist)
2007 Giller Prize (Shortlist)
Fiction
The Book of Secrets
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994.
PS8593 .A87 B66 1994
Publisher’s Synopsis
The Book of Secrets is a spellbinding novel of generations, which begins in 1988 in Dar es Salaam when the 1913 diary of a British colonial administrator is found in a shopkeeper’s backroom. The diary enflames the curiosity of retired schoolteacher Pius Fernandes, and his exploration of the stories it contains gradually connects the past with the present.
Awards and Honours
1994 Giller Prize (Winner)
1994 F.G. Bressani Prize (Winner)
Fiction
Everything There Is
Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2023.
PS8593.A87 E94 2023
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Nurul Islam is a world-renowned physicist, professor at Imperial College, London, and one half of the Islam-Rosenfeld theory, the first step in a grand unification of forces and a Theory of Everything. A family man profoundly influenced by his pious father, Nurul is happily married to Sakina Begum by an arranged marriage. They have three children. But when Nurul travels to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to give a public lecture at Harvard, he falls in love with a graduate student, Hilary Chase.
At the same time, Nurul Islam’s outspoken, philosophical views about the nature of physics and God have earned him the ire of fundamentalist preachers in Pakistan. He makes enemies of the political and military establishments when he refuses to contribute to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons project. Meanwhile, a contingent of physicists begins a smear campaign, claiming that Nurul Islams’s contribution to the unification theory was plagiarized. All these events converge upon Sakina Begum who, smarting from her husband’s betrayal, unwittingly commits a betrayal of her own. Everything that has worked together as though preordained since his child – hood to take him to the pinnacle of scientific achievement suddenly falls apart.
Fiction
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2003.
PS8593 .A97 I5 2003
Publisher’s Synopsis
It is 1953 in colonial Kenya, and eight-year-old Vikram Lall witnesses the celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, even as the Mau Mau guerilla war challenges British rule. …
We follow Vic from the changing Africa of the fifties, to the sixties– a time that holds immense promise. But when that hope is betrayed by the corruption, fear and repression of the seventies and eighties, Vic finds himself drawn into the official orbit of graft and power-brokering. …
Awards and Honours
2003 Giller Prize (Winner)
2004 Commonwealth Book Prize –Best Book (Caribbean and Canada Region)(Nominated)
2004 Libris Award – Fiction Book of the Year (Canadian Booksellers Association)(Nominated)
2004 Torgi Literary Awards for Books in Alternative Formats (CNIB-Produced Fiction)(Nominated)
2004 Trillium Book Award–English (Nominated)
Fiction
The Magic of Saida
Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2012.
PS8593 .A87 M33 2012
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
The Magic of Saida tells the haunting story of Kamal, a successful Canadian doctor who, in middle age and after decades in North America, decides to return to his homeland of East Africa to find his childhood sweetheart, Saida. Kamal’s journey is motivated by a combination of guilt, hope, and the desire to unravel the mysteries of his childhood–mysteries compounded by the fact that Kamal is the son of an absent Indian father from a well-to-do family and a Swahili African mother of slave ancestry. Through a series of flashbacks, we watch Kamal’s early years in the ancient coastal town of Kilwa, where he grows up in a world of poverty but also of poetry, sustained by his friendship with the magical Saida.
Fiction
No New Land: A Novel
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991.
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1997.
PS8593 .A87 N6 1997
Publisher’s Synopsis (M&S, 1997)
Nurdin Lalani and his family, Asian immigrants from Africa, have come to the Toronto suburb of Don Mills only to find that the old world and its values pursue them. A genial orderly at a downtown hospital, he has been accused of sexually assaulting a girl. Although he is innocent, traditional propriety prompts him to question the purity of his own thoughts. … Vassanji is a keen observer of lives caught between one world and another.
Fiction
Nostalgia: A Novel
Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2016.
PS8593 .A87 N68 2016
Publisher’s Synopsis
From one of Canada’s most celebrated writers, two-time Giller Prize winner Moyez Vassanji, comes a taut, ingenuous and dynamic novel about a future where eternal life is possible, and identities can be chosen.
Fiction (Short stories)
Uhuru Street: Short Stories
Toronto: M&S, 1992.
PS8593 .A87 U5 1992
Publisher’s Synopsis
In this unique collection of linked stories, the curtain is drawn back to reveal life in the Asian community of Dar es Salaam, a port city on the east coast of Africa. … The stories take us from the late colonial days of the 1950s through to the 1980s when many of the characters have moved away from the confines of their community …
Awards and Honours
The story “In the Quiet of a Sunday Afternoon” appeared in The Toronto South Asian Review and was shortlisted for the first annual awarding of The Journey Prize. It appeared in The Journey Prize Anthology: The Best Short Fiction From Canada’s Literary Journals (Toronto: M&S, 1989).
Fiction (Short stories)
What You Are: Short Stories
Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2021.
PS8593.A87 W43 2021
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Weaving between wistful memories of youthful ambition and the compromises and comforts of age, travelling between the streets of Dar es Salaam and Toronto, the characters in these stories must negotiate distance–between here and there; between lives imagined and lives lived; between expectation and disappointment; between inclusion and exclusion.
Fiction
When She Was Queen
Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2005.
PS8593 .A87 W44 2005
Published in India by Penguin Books India under title: Elvis, Raja: Stories
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website; based on paperback reprint)
Set variously in Kenya, Canada, India, Pakistan, and the American Midwest, these poignant and evocative stories portray migrants negotiating the in-between worlds of east and west, past and present, secular and religious. Richly detailed and full of vivid characters, the stories are worlds unto themselves, just as a dusty African street full of bustling shops is a world, and so is the small matrix of lives enclosed by an intimate Toronto neighbourhood. It is the smells and sentiments and small gestures that constitute life, and of these Vassanji is a master.
Awards and Honours
2006 Toronto Book Award (Finalist)
Anthology (Fiction)
The Monkey King and Other Stories
Vassanji, M.G.. “The Cycle of Revenge.” In The Monkey King and Other Stories, edited by Griffin Ondaatje. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1995.
Anthology (Fiction)
Tok. Book 5
Vassanji, M.G. “Death at Number Sixty-nine.” In Tok. Book 5, edited by Helen Walsh. Toronto: Zephyr Press, 2010, 151-157.
Non-fiction (Memoir/Travel)
And Home Was Kariakoo: A Memoir of East Africa
Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2014.
PS8593 .A87 Z462 2014
Publisher’s Synopsis
Part travelogue, part memoir, and part history-rarely-told, here is a powerful and timely portrait of a constantly evolving land. From a description of Zanzibar and its evolution to a visit to a slave-market town at Lake Tanganyika; from an encounter with a witchdoctor in an old coastal village to memories of his own childhood in the streets of Dar es Salaam and the suburbs of Nairobi, Vassanji combines brilliant prose, thoughtful and candid observation, and a lifetime of revisiting and reassessing the continent that molded him–and, as we discover when we follow the journeys that became this book, shapes him still.
Awards and Honours
2015 RBC Taylor Prize (Finalist)
Non-fiction
Nowhere, Exactly: On Identity and Belonging
Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2024.
forthcoming March 2024
Non-fiction (Memoir/Travel/History)
A Place Within: Rediscovering India
Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2008.
PS8593 .A87 Z47 2008
Publisher’s Synopsis
M.G. Vassanji’s grandparents went to Africa from India. An African by birth, Vassanji’s relationship to India in childhood had been complex and contradictory, fed by legends and stories. Now, in this powerfully moving tale of personal discovery, Vassanji explores his connection to the land that for so long was a place only of the imagination.
Awards and Honours
2009 Governor General’s Literary Award, Non-fiction, English Language (Winner)
Anthology (Memoir)
Passages: Welcome Home to Canada
Vassanji, M.G. “Canada and Me: Finding Ourselves.” In Passages: Welcome Home to Canada. Initiated by Westwood Creative Artists and the Dominion Institute. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2002.
This book grew out of the Dominion Institute’s Memory Project. Find out more at thememoryproject website.
Selected Criticism and Intepretation
Genetsch, Martin. The Texture of Identity: The Fiction of MG Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath, and Rohinton Mistry. Toronto: TSAR, 2008.
PS8089.5 .S68 G45 2007
Harting, Heike Helene. “Performative Metaphors in Caribbean and Ethnic Canadian Writing” Ph.D. diss., University of Victoria, 2000.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Kandiuk, Mary. “M. G. Vassanji.” In Caribbean and South Asian Writers in Canada: A Bibliography of Their Works and of English-language Criticism. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2007, 211-218.
PS8089.5 .C37 K36 2007
Makokha, Justus Siboe. Reading M.G. Vassanji: A Contextual Approach to Asian African Fiction. Berlin: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009.
PS8593 .A87 Z359 2009
Makokha, Justus Kizito Siboe. The Worlds in Between of an Asian African Writer: A Post-colonial Reading of Selected Novels of M.G. Vassanji. Nairobi: Kenyatta University, 2006. (M.A. Thesis)
Moss, Laura. “”The Multinational Song”: M.G. Vassanji’s Work in Canadian Context,” chap. in Confluences 2: Essays on the New Canadian Literature, ed. by Nurjehan Aziz. Toronto: Mawenzi House, 2017, pp. 72-82.
PS8117 .C66 2017
Mukherjee, Arun. “‘M G Vassanji’s ‘Uhuru Street’.” In Oppositional Aesthetics: Readings from a Hyphenated Space. Toronto: TSAR, 1994, 164-168.
PS8089.5 .M5 M85 1994
Mukherjee, Arun. “‘Writing from a Hard Place: The African Fiction of M G Vassanji.” In Oppositional Aesthetics: Readings from a Hyphenated Space. Toronto: TSAR, 1994, 169-178.
PS8089.5 .M5 M85 1994
Narula, Devika Khanna. South Asian Diaspora: Summer Blossoms in Winter Gardens: History, Memory and Identity in Canadian Fiction. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2005. (Includes one chapter focusing on The Gunny Sack, and another focusing on The Book of Secrets)
PS8089.5 .S68 N37 2005
Rahemtullah, Omme-Salma. “Interrogating “Indianness”: Identity and Diasporic Consciousness Among South Asian Twice Migrants in Canada.” M.A. diss., Toronto Metropolitan University, 2007.
FC106 .S66 R34 2007
TMU Electronic-book collection and ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
Roy, Hareshwar. “No New Land: A Story of Quest for Identity.” In Indian Diasporic Literature: Text, Context and Interpretation, ed. Shalini Dube, 57-62. New Delhi: Shree Publishers, 2009.
PK5416 .I53 2009
Salaye, Narvadha. “Marginalisation and the Construction of South-Asian Identity in Novels by Rohinton Mistry, Shyam Selvadurai and Moyez Vassanji.” M.A. diss., Université de Sherbrooke, 2002.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Samajdar, Saunak. “Rooting the Routes: Memory as the Ontology of the Expatriate in Vassanji’s Writings.” In The Expatriate Indian Writing in English. Vol. 1, ed. T. Vinoda and P. Shailaja, 2006, 197-208.
PR9489.6 .E96 2006 v.1
Sayed, Asma, ed. M. G. Vassanji: Essays on his Works. Toronto: Guernica, 2014.
PS8593 .A87 Z348 2014
Stump, Janet L. “Narrative Space and Place: Identity on the Move” M.A. diss., University of Alaska Anchorage, 2002.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses
Links
M.G. Vassanji’s personal website
Publisher Doubleday Canada
Publisher McClelland & Stewart
Publisher Penguin Books India
Publisher Mawenzi House (formerly TSAR)
Publisher Random House of Canada