Shani Mootoo To Join Amitava Kumar In Conversation

The Koffler Centre of the Arts announced today that the award-winning writer and visual artist Shani Mootoo will join author and journalist Amitava Kumar in conversation on Wednesday, April 3, 2019, 7:00 PM at The Great Hall. Kumar is the author of several books of nonfiction, poetry, and his most recent novel, Immigrant, Montana - one of President Obama's favourite books of 2018. Immigrant, Montana was also selected by the New York Times and The New Yorker as one of the top titles of the past year.

Shani Mootoo was born in Ireland, grew up in Trinidad, and has lived in Canada most of her life. She writes fiction and poetry, and is a visual artist whose paintings and short videos have been exhibited locally and internationally. Mootoo's critically acclaimed novels include Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab, Valmiki's Daughter, He Drown She in the Sea, and Cereus Blooms at Night. She is a recipient of the K.M. Hunter Arts Award, a Chalmers Fellowship Award, and most recently the James Duggins Outstanding Midcareer Novelist Award.

Weaving together fiction and autobiography, Immigrant, Montana tells the story of Kailash, a young Indian man who leaves home to attend graduate school in the United States. As he begins to settle into American existence, Kailash navigates his new identity through a series of messy romantic relationships. Set against the backdrop of a New York college campus, Immigrant, Montana is an exploration of immigration and selfhood, memory and desire, politics and sex.

Looking back on the formative period of his youth, Kailash's wry, vivid perception of the world he is in, but never quite of, unfurls in a brilliant melding of anecdote and annotation, picture and text. Building a case for himself, both as a good man in spite of his flaws and as an American in defiance of his place of birth, Kailash weaves a story that is at its core an incandescent investigation of love-despite, beyond, and across dividing lines.