Rohinton mistry

Biography

Moyez G. Vassanji was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1950 and raised in Tanzania. His family was part of a community of Indians who had emigrated to Africa. When he was 19, Vassanji left the University of Nairobi on a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied nuclear physics in which he later earned a Ph.D  at the University of Pennsylvania. After his Ph.D, he emigrated to Canada where he worked at the Chalk River atomic power station. In 1980, Vassanji moved to Toronto and began writing his first novel The Gunny Sack which was published in 1989. That year, with his wife Nurjehan Aziz, he founded and edited the first issue of The Toronto South Asian Review (TSAR). After the publication of The Gunny Sack, Vassanji began writing full-time and ended his career in physics. Studying Sanskrit and Indian philology prompted Vassanji’s career change. In an interview with Chelva Kanaganayakam, Vassanji  said this of his decision to leave the field of physics:

It is the kind of thing you can keep on doing. I had reached a point when I could just

•

Selected Criticism and Intepretation

Genetsch, Martin. The Texture of Identity: The Fiction of MG Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath, and Rohinton Mistry. Toronto: TSAR, 2008.
PS8089.5 .S68 G45 2007

Harting, Heike Helene. “Performative Metaphors in Caribbean and Ethnic Canadian Writing” Ph.D. diss., University of Victoria, 2000.
Available from Proquest Dissertations and Theses

Kandiuk, Mary. “M. G. Vassanji.” In Caribbean and South Asian Writers in Canada: A Bibliography of Their Works and of English-language Criticism. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2007, 211-218.
PS8089.5 .C37 K36 2007

Makokha, Justus Siboe. Reading M.G. Vassanji: A Contextual Approach to Asian African Fiction. Berlin: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009.
PS8593 .A87 Z359 2009

Makokha, Justus Kizito Siboe. The Worlds in Between of an Asian African Writer: A Post-colonial Reading of Selected Novels of M.G. Vassanji. Nairobi: Kenyatta University, 2006. (M.A. Thesis)

Moss, Laura. “”The Multinational Song”: M.G. Vassanji’s Work in Canadian Context,” chap. in Confluences

•

M.G. Vassanji

Love, Secrets, and Second Chances—February’s Must-Read Books Await!

M.G. Vassanji was born in Kenya, and raised in Tanzania. He took a doctorate in physics at M.I.T. and came to Canada in 1978. While working as a research associate and lecturer at the University of Toronto in the 1980s he began to dedicate himself seriously to a longstanding passion: writing.His first novel, The Gunny Sack, won a regional Commonwealth Writers Prize, and he was invited to be writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa. The novel’s success was a spur, Vassanji has commented: “It was translated into several languages. I was confident that this was what I could do, that writing was not just wishful thinking. In 1989 I quit my full-time job and began researching The Book of Secrets.” That celebrated, bestselling novel won the inaugural Giller Prize, in 1994.Vassanji’s other books include the acclaimed novels No New Land (1991) and Amriika (1999), and Uhuru Street (1991), a collection of stories. His unique place in Canadian literature comes from his elegant,