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.[1] 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 McWatt moved to London, England, where she taught creative writing and wrote.[1] She is presently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK.[2]

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 Canadian Governor General's Literary Awards.[3][4] 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).[5]

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.[6][7]

She is the co-editor, along with Dionne Brand and Rabindranath Maharaj, of Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada (Cormorant Books, 2018).[8] She was one of the winners of the Eccles British Library Award 2018[9] for her critical memoir Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, which was also shortlisted for the 2020 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.[10]