Friday, May 14, 7:30 pm (UTC+2)
Jaspreet Singh is a novelist and a former research scientist. He was born in India and moved to Canada in 1990. He received his doctorate in chemical engineering from McGill University. His books have been published internationally and have been translated into several languages, including French, Arabic, Italian, Spanish and Punjabi. His non-fiction has appeared in Granta, Brick: A Literary Journal, and The New York Times.
His debut collection of stories, Seventeen Tomatoes, received the Quebec First Book Prize. His novel Chef (about the damaged landscapes of Kashmir) was a finalist for a Commonwealth prize and won the Canadian George Bugnet award for fiction. Helium, his critically acclaimed second novel was a 2013 Observer Best Book of the Year in the UK. The Globe and Mail called it a ‘tour de force’ and the Financial Times described it as a ‘powerful meditation on historical forgetting’. November, a collection of poems, appeared in 2017.
Most recently he held writer-in-residence positions at Calgary Public Library (Fall 2019) and Fondation Jan Michalski, Switzerland (Spring 2020). In 2017-2018 he was (by invitation) a fellow at the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany. While in Germany he began researching and writing a work of fiction that engages with the climate crisis.
Jaspreet Singh’s memoir My Mother, My Translator will be available in Fall 2021. His book Face – a novel of the Anthropocene – will be published in Spring 2022. He lives in Calgary.
Image courtesy Jaspreet Singh