Anita Rau Badami

Anita Rau Badami wrote copy and freelance journalism in India before moving to Canada in 1991 and taking a creative writing master's at Calgary in 1995. Born in Rourkela in 1961, she published Tamarind Mem in 1997 and followed it with The Hero's Walk, which took the regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Canada and the Caribbean and Italy's Premio Berto. Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?, from 2006, follows three women, Bibi-ji, Leela and Nimmo, across some sixty years and between Delhi, Bangalore and Vancouver, taking in the 1947 partition, the violence that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, and the destruction of Air India Flight 182 the year after. It was longlisted for the IMPAC award. Tell It to the Trees, her fourth novel, arrived in 2011, reached the same longlist and the Quebec Writers' Federation Hugh MacLennan Prize shortlist. She holds the Marian Engel Award for a woman writer at mid-career, paints, and lives in Montreal.