Writer in residence

Kagiso Lesego Molope is an Indigenous South African who writes post-apartheid, feminist and resistance literature. Her work centres the history and experiences of indigenous South Africans and tackles issues of race, class, sexuality and identity. Her published novels are Dancing in the Dust, The Mending Season, This Book Betrays My Brother and Such a Lonely, Lovely Road. Her play, Maya Angelou: Black Woman Rising has been produced and staged at Oslo’s Nordic Black Theatre. She became the first indigenous South African writer to be on the IBBY List in 2006 and to win the Patrick Fitzpatrick Award for Young Adult Literature. In 2019 she won both the Ottawa Book Award and the Inaugural Pius Adesanmi Memorial award, for her third and fourth books respectively. She has been living in Canada for the past two decades.

Starting in September, Kagiso will be available to provide feedback on students’ own creative writing. She will also be offering occasional readings and workshops. Stay tuned for those announcements!

Kagiso will also be teaching ENG 4397, an advanced writing seminar entitled “Writing the Young Adult Voice.” The class looks at writing for and about young adults and will help aspiring writers develop an authentic and nuanced voice to reach young people. Her reading list will include the likes of Cherie Dimaline, Heather Smith, Jay Odjik and Sabina Khan, among others.

Shyam Selvadurai 's Funny Boy, won the W.H. Smith/ Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Lambda Literary Award in the US. He is the author of Cinnamon Gardens, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea and The Hungry Ghosts. His work has been translated into 9 languages and published worldwide. Funny Boy was made into a film, for which Shyam co-wrote the screenplay, and for which he won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Adapted Screenplay 2021. Shyam’s new novel Mansion of the Moon, a historical novel about the Buddha’s wife, will be released by Knopf in 2022. 

Stuart Ross is a writer, editor, writing teacher, publisher, and small press activist. He published his first poetry chapbook on the photocopier in his dad’s office in 1979 and never looked back. Stuart was the recipient of the 2019 Harbourfront Festival Prize for his contributions to Canadian literature, as well as the 2010 ReLit Prize for Short Fiction, the 2012 Mona Elaine Adilman Award for Jewish Fiction, the 2016 Kitty Lewis Hazel Millar Dennis Tourbin Poetry Prize, and the 2017 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry.

His 20 books of fiction, poetry, and essays include Motel of the Opposable Thumbs; A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent; Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew; Buying Cigarettes for the Dog; and Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer. His latest book is 70 Kippers, a collection of poems written in collaboration with Ottawa poet Michael Dennis.

Stuart has taught writing workshops across the country and was the 2010 writer in residence at Queen’s University. He is thrilled to be the winter 2021 writer in residence at the University of Ottawa.

His poetry has been translated into French, Nynorsk, Slovene, Russian, Spanish, and Estonian. Stuart, who lives in Cobourg, Ontario, is currently working on eleven different book manuscripts.

Award-winning author and poet Rawi Hage grew up in Beirut before moving to Canada in 1992. Along with his 4 award-winning novels, he has published journalism and short fiction in magazines such as the PEN America Journal. In August 2013, he was named Vancouver Public Library's Ninth Writer in Residence.

Rawi’s first in a series of awards was the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2008 for his internationally acclaimed debut novel 'De Niro's Game'. He then went on to win the Paragraph Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction in 2008 for his novel Cockroach and again in 2018 for Carnival. Rawi has also been a short-listed finalist for major awards such as the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction for his renowned 2018 book 'Beirut Hellfire Society'. More recently, in November 2019, Rawi received the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award from the Writers' Trust of Canada, awarded annually to a mid-career fiction writer with a remarkable body of work.

His books have been translated into 30 languages and are read around the world. For his next project, Rawi intends to return to the genre in which he first made his name, the short story.

Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in the (Lao) Nong Khai refugee camp in Thailand in 1978. She and her parents were sponsored by a family in Canada when she was one year old. She was raised and educated in Toronto, Ontario. Her first book,Small Arguments, won a ReLit Award in 2004. Her second book,Found, was made into a short film by Paramita Nath. Her third book,Light, won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry in 2014. Her short story How to Pronounce Knife was shortlisted for the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize out of 4000 entries.

Madeleine Thien is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes; and three novels, including Dogs at the Perimeter, which was shortlisted for Berlin’s International Literature Award and won the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 2015 Liberaturpreis. Her novels and stories have been translated into twenty-five languages, and her essays have appeared in Granta, The Guardian, the Financial Times, Five Dials, Brick, Al Jazeera and elsewhere. The daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants to Canada, she lives in Montreal. Her new novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, about music, art and revolution in China, was published in 2016.

Phil Hall won the 2011 Governor General’s Award for the Poetry in English, and the 2012 Trillium Award, for his book Killdeer.  His most recent books The Small Nouns Crying Faith (2013),  and  Notes from Gethsemani (2014)

In Windsor, Ontario, in 1976, Hall started Flat Singles Press, producing broadsides & chapbooks. After university, he lived in Vancouver, where he was a member of the Vancouver Industrial Writers' Union, the Vancouver Men Against Rape Collective, and the Starvation Army Band. In the late 80s he often wrote reviews of poetry and children's literature for Books In Canada, and was the Literary Editor for This Magazine. He also edited (with Andrew Vaisius) a short-lived journal called Don't Quite Yr Day-Job.

Hall has taught writing and literature at York University, Ryerson University, George Brown College, and Seneca College. He has been writer-in-residence at Queen's University, the University of Windsor, the University of Western Ontario, The Sage Hill Writing Experience, the Pierre Berton House, and the Banff Centre for the Arts.

In 2011, Hall won Canada's Governor General's Award for Poetry in English, for his collection, Killdeer, a work the jury called "a masterly modulation of the elegiac through poetic time." Killdeer also won the 2012 Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the 2012 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize.

Nancy Richler is the author of three highly celebrated novels, the most recent of which, The Imposter Bride (HarperCollins 2012), was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her earlier novels also made significant impacts upon the Canadian and international literary scenes. Richler’s first book, Throwaway Angels (Press Gang, 1996), focuses on the women who went missing in Vancouver’s Downtown East side. The tragedy of “Vancouver’s missing women” is now well known, but it didn’t become widely recognized as a serious problem until several years after Richler’s book was published.Richler gave voice to a number of otherwise underrepresented, if not outright silenced, individuals and social issues in Canada. The novel was also highly regarded for its aesthetic merits, particularly in the area of crime fiction. It was a finalist for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Crime Novel.Richler’s second book, Your Mouth is Lovely (HarperCollins / Ecco 2002), is a historical novel set in Russia between 1890 and 1912. It was awarded the 2003 Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction, as well as the 2004 Italian Adei Wizo award. Richler’s first international success, this book was favourably reviewed in such publications as The National Post, The New Yorker, and Quill and Quire. It was also translated into seven languages: French, Italian, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Hebrew.The Imposter Bridebuilds upon Richler’s previous achievement in the genre of historical fiction. Set in post-war Montreal, this fascinating novel is told partly from the perspective of Russian-born Lily Azertov, a Holocaust survivor who travels to Canada to marry a man she has never met only to be rejected by him, and partly from the perspective of her daughter Ruth, who seeks to find out the hidden history of her mother’s past. The Giller jury citation for this book calls The Imposter Bride a “wonderfully nuanced work of fiction by a master of the craft.” In addition to being shortlisted for the Giller, The Imposter Brideappeared in The Globe and Mail’s best books of the year list. It has already been translated into Dutch, and there are three more translations forthcoming. We are delighted to welcome Nancy Richler to our department as Writer-in-Residence for the Winter 2014 semester.

Erín Moure is one of Canada's most eminent and respected poets, and a translator of poetry and essays from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese.

She has published more than a dozen books of poetry, most recently a collaborative book of translational poetic clamours with Oana Avasilichioaei, Expeditions of a Chimæra (BookThug, 2009), her own O Cadoiro (Anansi, 2007), and Little Theatres (Anansi, 2005). She holds a D.Lit. (honoris causa) from Brandon University and earns her living as a freelance translator, editor and communications specialist in Montreal.

Her 2005 Little Theatres was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the GGs, won the AJM Klein Prize, made the Globe 100, and appeared in Galician as Teatriños (Vigo: Galaxia, 2007). Her translation of Galician poet Chus Pato's Charenton came out in 2007 (Shearsman UK and BuschekBooks Ottawa) and her translation of Pato's m-Talá in 2009 from the same presses. Her translation with Robert Majzels of Nicole Brossard's Notebook of Roses and Civilization was a finalist for the Griffin Prize and the GG. Her 1988 book of poetry Furious was awarded the Governor General's Award.

A book of essays spanning her twenty-five years of poetic practice, My Beloved Wager, is due out in November 2009 (NeWest), and in 2010 she will publish a new book of poetry, O Resplandor (Anansi) and a translation of Chus Pato's acclaimed (Losada Dieguez Prize, Spanish Critics' Prize) Hordes of Writing (Shearsman, BuschekBooks).