Shani Mootoo
Shani Mootoo, writer, visual artist and video maker, was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1957 to Trinidadian Parents. She grew up in Trinidad and relocated at age 24 to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She currently lives in Toronto, Canada.
At an early age Mootoo showed a talent for drawing, painting and writing, expressing at age 10 the goal of becoming an artist. Her early efforts, and what were to prove to be a lifelong interest in food, cooking, and aesthetics in general, were encouraged by her mother Indra née Samaroo, while a sense of social responsibility and political activism, evident in the themes in her work, and in her work practice itself, can be said to have been inherited from her father Romesh Mootoo, medical family doctor and Trinidad politician who held among other posts, the positions of party leader, Mayor of San Fernando and Senator.
Mootoo’s visual art and video work have been exhibited internationally, and her fiction has been translated into 9 languages. Her 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 USA, England, Europe, India, and Australia. Her writing and art work have been extensively critically reviewed, and have been the subject of conferences, articles, journals and books. She has served as Writer in Residence at the University of Alberta, the University of Guelph and the University of the West Indies, as a Visiting Scholar at Mills College in California, USA, and is a frequent invitee on the international reading and speaking scene. In 2008, The University of The West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados hosted The Symposium on The Fictions of Shani Mootoo in the Context of Caribbean Women’s Writings.
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 Mootoo's experiences as an adolescent in Trinidad and as an immigrant adult in Canada. Mootoo's visual art and video work have traveled and been acclaimed internationally.
Mootoo’s first literary publication,Out on Main Street", a collection of short stories, was solicited by the Vancouver-based feminist press Press Gang in 1993 and was the beginning of her literary career. Her first full length novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, was published by Press Gang in 1996 and was shortlisted for the Scotia BankGiller Prize in 1997, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Chapters Books in Canada First Novel Award, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Set on a tropical island, Cereus Blooms and Night is written in a luminous, poetic style that evokes the duality of the Caribbean landscape, the simultaneously sublime and dangerous qualities of place. 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.<ref name="Httpwwwuoguelphcaatguelphprofileshtml">http://www.uoguelph.ca/atguelph/09-10-28/profile.shtml</ref>
In 2002, Mootoo followed up her largely successful first novel with a collection of poetry, The Predicament of Or.
Mootoo's second full length novel, He Drown She in the Sea published in 2005, also earned acclamation making the long list for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2007.<ref>http://www.sawnet.org/books/authors.php?Mootoo+Shani</ref>
Mootoo's most recent novel, Valmiki's Daughter, depicts a father and daughter who struggle to come to terms with secrets. Set in San Fernando, Trinidad, 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 a strongly evoked backdrop of place, Valmiki's Daughter charts Viveka's coming to terms with the hard understanding that love faces society's obstacles, and her knowledge of her certain survival. Published in 2009, Valmiki's Daughter was long-listed for 2009's Scotiabank Giller Prize.<ref>http://www.xtra.ca/public/National/Book_review_Valmikis_Daughter-5877.aspx</ref>
Shani Mootoo's body of work has made a substantial contribution to literature, particularly with respect to her ability to weave sublimity of prose, and the natural world evoked by this, with individual trauma. In this way her work speaks to a larger experience, with the specificities of place, history and sexuality reflects a universal desire for truth, love and beauty. By foregrounding sexual difference in much of her work, Mootoo creates space for alternative experiences and in so doing challenges and undoes the dehumanizing conservatism of Caribbean society and elsewhere. By insisting on the truth of experience, Mootoo creates a world in which a kind of reconciliation is always possible, even in life's most contentious moments.