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Shani Mootoo is a Trinidadian-Canadian writer, visual artist and video maker. She was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1957 to Trinidadian parents. She grew up in Trinidad and relocated at the age of 19 to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She currently lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Mootoo earned a Fine Arts BFA Degree at the University of Western Ontario in 1980 and an MA in English and Theatre from the University of Guelph, 2010. As a multimedia visual artist in Vancouver and New York City, where she lived from 1994 to 1999, she explored in her paintings, photographs and videos themes of gender, sexuality, and race. The themes of her work resonated with her experiences as an adolescent in Trinidad and as an immigrant adult in Canada. Her visual art and video work have traveled and been acclaimed internationally. She is now teaching the Creative Writing Program at the University of Toronto.
Her first full-length novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, published by Press Gang in 1996, was shortlisted for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize in 1997, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Chapters Books in Canada First Novel Award. It has been published in 15 countries and won the New England Book Sellers Award in 1998. Set on a tropical island, the novel is narrated by a male nurse and caretaker, and explores trauma, madness and redemption, the legacies of sexual abuse, and the boundaries between heterosexual and homosexual desire.Andrew Vowles, "A New Write of Passage", People at Guelph, Volume 53, No. 16, October 28, 2009.
In 2002, Mootoo followed her first novel with a collection of poetry, The Predicament of Or.
Her second full-length novel, He Drown She in the Sea, was published in 2005. It made the long list for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2007. "Shani Mootoo" , Sawnet Bookshelf.
Her 2008 novel, Valmiki's Daughter, is set in San Fernando, Trinidad, and depicts a father and daughter who struggle to come to terms with secrets. Mootoo has said that the story is about a father trying to help his daughter from leading the same kind of closeted life that he has led. Viveka and her father's lives are each underpinned by the constraints of class and race, and most importantly by the sexual conventions of their society. Set against its strongly evoked backdrop of place, the novel charts Viveka's coming to terms with the hard understanding that love faces society's obstacles, and her knowledge of her certain survival. Valmiki's Daughter was long-listed for 2009's Scotiabank Giller Prize.Maureen Phillips, "Book review: Valmiki's Daughter - Shani Mootoo crafts treacherous seas", November 25, 2008. In an interview, Mootoo explained her realization that she had written about food on almost every page of Valmiki's Daughter without realizing it. She discusses the importance of food and entertaining people in Trinidadian culture, as well as in her life and her other work.
Mootoo's two most recent novels, Moving Forward Sideways like a Crab (2014) and Polar Vortex (2020), were also shortlisted for the Giller Prize.
Mootoo's novels are found on course lists in the Departments of English, Liberal Arts, Women's Studies, and Cultural Studies at universities in the Caribbean, Canada, the United States, England, Europe, India, and Australia.
Mootoo's literary papers are held at Simon Fraser University Special Collections and Rare Books. The collection contains "printed typescripts of published works with drafts and related working papers, published reviews, drafts of unpublished works, lecture notes, professional correspondence, notebooks and sketchbooks, video productions in VHS format, audio materials and works of visual art".
In 2022 the Writers' Trust of Canada awarded Mootoo its Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award for her body of work.Deborah Dundas, "Writers’ Trust 2022 book award winners collect $270,000 in prizes". Toronto Star, November 2, 2022.
In 2009, she served on the jury for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize, a literary award for emerging LGBT writers in Canada, selecting Debra Anderson as that year's prize winner. "Code write" . Xtra!, June 18, 2009.
Mootoo has spoken out against child abuse. In 1989 she addressed Sex Offenders at Stave Lake Correctional Centre about being a survivor of child abuse and suffering.
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