Tessa McWatt

Tessa McWatt FRSL
Tessa McWatt on Bookbits radio
Born	Georgetown, Guyana
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

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. In 2021 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Early life

McWatt was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and moved to Canada with her family when she was three years old. She was raised in Toronto, where her family embraced the Canadian outdoors through camping, skiing, and canoeing. As a child, McWatt was interested in music, sports, and literature. Even as a child she knew she wanted to be a writer.

Education

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.

Career

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.

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. 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) 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.

She is the co-editor, along with Dionne Brand and Rabindranath Maharaj, of Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada (Cormorant Books, 2018). She was one of the winners of the Eccles British Library Award 2018 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, 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.

Bibliography

Books

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

Essays and reporting

• McWatt, Tessa (July 18, 2008). "But the rose fell on Azor's Paw". Wasafiri. 17 (35): 51–56. doi:10.1080/02690050208589774. S2CID 162914405.
• McWatt, Tessa (3–23 April 2020). "The slave and master inside me". Personal Story. New Statesman. 149 (5514): 52.
• Taneja, Preti; McWatt, Tessa (22 October 2020). "SHAME ON ME: Professor Tessa McWatt in Conversation with Dr Preti Taneja". Feminist Review. 126 (1): 139–145. doi:10.1177/0141778920942761.

Sources

• 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.]

External links

• 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.]