Rohinton mistry

Books by m.g. vassanji
M.G.
He earned a BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a PhD in nuclear physics from the University of Pennsylvania before coming to Canada in 1978.

•

What Tomorrow Brings with Michael Helm and M.G. Vassanji

Join us for one-on-one conversations with two of this country’s most acclaimed acclaimed authors whose new novels deftly conjure the world of tomorrow to explore who we are now. As TS Eliot famously suggested, the past and future, “point to one end, which is always present.” Don’t miss these conversations on what tomorrow can tell us about today.

After James by Giller Prize finalist Michael Helm is a genre-bending work of astonishing vision and a dazzling story of our times. A neuroscientist retreats to a secluded cabin in the woods, intending to blow the whistle on a pharmaceutical company and its creativity drug gone wrong. A failed poet is lured to Rome as a “literary detective” to decode the work of a mysterious Internet poet who seems to write about murders with precise knowledge of private details. On the heels of a life crisis, a virologist discovers her identity has been stolen by a conceptual artist in whose work someone always goes missing. Aft

•

Michael Ondaatje and M.G. Vassanji make the Giller cut

Work by two authors with connections to York University have been included in the short list for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. They include former Giller prize winners Michael Ondaatje, a Glendon English professor, and M.G. Vassanji, a York honorary degree recipient (DLitt ‘05).

The award honours the year’s best work in fiction. The jury for the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize chose from 108 books submitted by 46 publishers from across Canada. The prize, worth $40,000, is one of the richest and most prestigious prizes in Canadian literature.

Michael Ondaatje (left) is the author of such acclaimed novels as In the Skin of a Lion (1996), The English Patient (1996), and Anil’s Ghost (2000), which won the 2000 Giller Prize. His other books include Running in the Family (1993), Coming Through Slaughter (1998), The Cinnamon Peeler (1992), and Handwriting (2000). Ondaatje is a professor in the Department of English at Glendon.

He was nominated for his most recent novel Divisadero (2007).

•

M.G. Vassanji

Moyez J. Vassanji was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1950 and raised in Tanzania. His parents were a part of a wave of Indians who immigrated to Africa. Vassanji studied at the University of Nairobi and then at MIT on a scholarship. He earned a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics from the University of Pennsylvania. He worked at the Chalk River atomic power station and then moved to Toronto in 1980. He and his wife, Nurjehan Aziz, started the Toronto South Asian Review, in 1981, which continues today as Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad.

Vassanji also began writing his first novel in 1980, The Gunny Sack, which was published in 1989. The novel won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and established Vassanji as an important voice in the emerging field of immigrant/minority writers. In The Gunny Sack, Vassanji tells the story of four generations of Asians in Tanzania. He examines the themes of identity, displacement and race relations. He also tries to preserve and recreate oral histories and mythologies that have long been silenced.

In 1992, Vassanji published