Tessa McWatt

Tessa McWatt is a Guyanese-born Canadian writer. She was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and moved to Canada with her family when she was three years old. She studied English Literature at Queens University and then earned her MA at University of Toronto. After University, she found employment as an editor and college instructor, whilst living in Montreal, Paris, and Ottawa. In 1999 McWhatt moved to London, England, where she taught creative writing and wrote. She is presently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK.

She is the author of novels, stories, essays and libretto, along with There's No Place Like... (2004) a novella for young adults. Her first novel was Out of My Skin, the story of an adopted Canadian woman seeking her roots (1998; second edition Cormorant Books, 2012), Her second novel, Dragons Cry (2001), was shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Awards and the Governor General Awards of Canada. Her other novels include This Body (HarperCollins, 2004, and Macmillan Caribbean, 2005), Step Closer (HarperCollins 2009), Vital Signs (Random House Canada 2011 and William Heinemann, 2012), which was nominated for the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and Higher Ed (Random House Canada and Scribe UK, 2015).

McWatt provided the libretto for Hannah Kendall's opera The Knife of Dawn, based on the incarceration of political activist Martin Carter in the then British Guiana in 1953.[1][2]

She is the co-editor, along with Dionne Brand and Rabindranath Maharaj, of Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada (Cormorant Books, 2018).[3] She was one of the winners of the Eccles British Library Award 2018[4] for her critical memoir Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging.

Books
YearTitlePublisherAwards
1998, 2012Out of My SkinCormorant Books
2001Dragon's CryCormorant BooksCity of Toronto Book Award (shortlisted), Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction (shortlisted)
2004, 2005This BodyHarperCollins, Macmillan Caribbean
2009Step CloserHarperCollins
2011, 2012Vital SignsRandom House Canada, HeinemannOCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (nominated)
2015Higher EdRandom House Canada, Scribe UK
2019/20 Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging Scribe UK, Random House Canada Eccles British Library Award 2018
2020 Where Are You Agnes? Groundwood Books
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References
  1. "Hannah Kendall". Funding New Music. PRS for Music Foundation. Retrieved 1 April 2015.
  2. "The Knife of Dawn". Hannah Kendall homepage. Retrieved 1 April 2015.
  3. Luminous Ink at Cormorant Books.
  4. "Eccles British Library Writer's Award 2018 winners announced", News, British Library, 21 November 2017.
  • Works by or about Tessa McWatt in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
  • Beckford, Sharon Morgan. Naturally Woman: The Search for Self in Black Canadian Women's Literature. Toronto: Inanna, 2011. [Chapter 4 provides a reading of McWatt's Out of My Skin as a fiction about the issues of individuation that black female characters face as immigrants to Canada.]
  • Lacombe, Michèle. "Embodying the Glocal. Immigrant and Indigenous Ideas of Home in Tessa McWatt's Montreal." In Ana María Fraile-Marcos, ed., Literature and the Glocal City. London: Routledge, 2014. 39–54. [Lacombe analyses the writer's account of the Oka crisis in Out of My Skin and the main character's problematic reliance on Indigenous spirituality.]
  • Rosenthal, Caroline. "Embodying the City: Tessa McWatt's This Body and Out of My Skin". Canada and Beyond 4. 1-2 (2014): 23–40. [Rosenthal reads McWatt's treatment of the body in connection to urban space and describes embodied practices.]


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