David Chariandy

Scarborough, Ontario, is where David Chariandy grew up, son of a Trinidadian father of South Asian descent and a Black Trinidadian mother who both came to Canada in the 1960s. Born in 1969, he took a master's degree at Carleton and a PhD from York, taught English at Simon Fraser in Vancouver for many years, and joined Toronto's English department in 2024. I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter, published by McClelland and Stewart in 2018, is a short book-length letter written to his daughter, then thirteen; he has traced it to a racist remark aimed at them in a Vancouver restaurant when she was three. His first novel, Soucouyant, reached the Governor General's Award shortlist in 2007. Brother, in 2017, took the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, then the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Toronto Book Award the year after. Yale awarded him a Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction in 2019.