| Honorific Suffix: | FRSL |
| Occupation: | Author, Professor |
| Alma Mater: | Queen's University, University of Toronto |
| Notable Works: | Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, Dragon's Cry |
| Birth Place: | Georgetown, Guyana |
Tessa McWatt FRSL is a Guyanese-born Canadian writer. She has written seven novels and is a creative writing professor at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, United Kingdom.[1] In 2021 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
McWatt was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and moved to Canada with her family when she was three years old.[2] She was raised in Toronto, where her family embraced the Canadian outdoors through camping, skiing, and canoeing.[3] As a child, McWatt was interested in music, sports, and literature. Even as a child she knew she wanted to be a writer.
McWatt studied English literature at Queen's University and then earned her MA at the University of Toronto. Her MA focused on post-colonial literature and explored subject matter like how outsiders are perceived within society and how there are conflicting ideas regarding belonging.
After university, she found employment as an editor and college instructor, while living in Montreal, Paris, and Ottawa. In 1999, McWatt 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.[4]
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.[5] [6] 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, Higher Ed (Random House Canada and Scribe UK, 2015)[7] and The Snow Line (Random House Canada and Scribe UK, 2021), nominated for the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize.
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.[8] [9]
She is the co-editor, along with Dionne Brand and Rabindranath Maharaj, of Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada (Cormorant Books, 2018).[10] She was one of the winners of the Eccles British Library Award 2018[11] 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,[12] the 2020 Canadian Governor General's Literary Awards for Non-Fiction, and it was the Non-Fiction Winner of the 2020 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
| Year | Title | Publisher | Awards | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1998, 2012 | Out of My Skin | Cormorant Books | ||
| 2001 | Dragon's Cry | Cormorant Books | City of Toronto Book Award (shortlisted), Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction (shortlisted) | |
| 2004 | There's No Place Like... (novella) | Macmillan Caribbean | ||
| 2004, 2005 | This Body | HarperCollins, Macmillan Caribbean | ||
| 2009 | Step Closer | HarperCollins | ||
| 2011, 2012 | Vital Signs | Random House Canada, Heinemann | OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (nominated) | |
| 2013 | "The Taste of Marmalade" (short story) | |||
| 2015 | Higher Ed | Random House Canada, Scribe UK | ||
| 2018 | Luminous Ink (anthology) | Cormorant Books | ||
| 2019/20 | Shame on Me An Anatomy of Race and Belonging | Scribe UK, Random House Canada | Eccles British Library Award 2018, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (nominated), Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction (finalist) | |
| 2020 | Where Are You Agnes? | Groundwood Books | ||
| 2022 | The Snow Line | Scribe UK | Shortlisted for Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize for a travel-based novel[13] |