Neil Bissoondath

Erin Goheen Glanville (Simon Fraser University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.1.2: Canadian Writing and Culture (Anglophone): The Twentieth Century and beyond, 1900-present.
Vol. editors: Claire-Marie Brisson (Harvard University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Glen Nichols (Mount Allison University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Wendy Roy (University of Saskatchewan), Denis Salter (McGill University), Karis Shearer (University of British Columbia)

Dates

Born 19 Apr 1955
Activity 1975-ongoing

Places

Born in Trinidad
Active in Canada; Trinidad

Cultural Identities

Black Canadian

Activities

Primary

Novelist
Story-writer

Resources

Bissoondath’s writing career was kick-started in 1984 when he received the Banff School of Fine Arts writing scholarship. This led to the publication in 1985 of Digging Up the Mountains, a collection of short stories that explore the alienating experience of migration. The collection was met with glowing reviews, and one of the short stories, “Dancing”, won both the McClelland Stewart Award for Fiction and the National Magazine Award. Six novels, a second anthology of short stories, a major non-fiction volume, radio pieces, and numerous non-fiction essays followed, and Bissoondath quickly became a significant part of Canada’s literary culture. He is most appreciated for his corpus of novels and short stories which depict individual characters coming from a variety of subject positions, each character dealing with cultural dislocation or being otherwise displaced by political violence....

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1526 words

Citation: Goheen Glanville, Erin. "Neil Bissoondath". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 January 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=423, accessed 09 June 2026.]