Spotlight on New South Asian Writing

An evening of readings and discussion from new South Asian voices of the Diaspora exploring the nature of exile and belonging through poetry and fiction.

Join host, Shyam Selvadurai, bestselling Canadian author of Funny Boy, Cinnamon Gardens, and Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, for an evening featuring three authors' very different perspectives on the cultures of South Asia and the West.

Hear readings from British poet Daljit Nagra (Look We Have Coming to Dover!), winner of the 2007 UK Forward Poetry Prize for best new collection; Canadian author Jaspreet Singh, whose new book Chef explores the complexity of Kashmir; and Padma Viswanathan (The Toss of a Lemon), one of Random House of Canada's New Faces of Fiction, 2008.

*Tickets are available at Ticketmaster outlets and at TO Tix in Yonge-Dundas Square. Additional fees apply to internet and telephone bookings.

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Shyam Selvadurai was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Funny Boy his first novel was published to acclaim in 1994 and won the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award and The Lambda Literary Award in the U.S. He is the author of Cinnamon Gardens and Swimming in the Monsoon Sea and the editor of an anthology, Story-wallah! A Celebration of South Asian Fiction.

Daljit Nagra was born and raised in West London, then Sheffield, and currently lives in Willesden where he works in a secondary school. Look We Have Coming to Dover! won the 2007 Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award.

Jaspreet Singh's Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir won the Quebec Writers' Federation 2004 First Book Prize. It has been translated into Spanish and Punjabi. In 2002, Quill & Quire magazine identified him as one of "five new talents to watch." His stories have appeared in Alphabet City (MIT Press), ascent, Coming Attractions, subTerrain, Maisonneuve, Fiddlehead, Walrus, Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope, and CBC Radio.

Padma Viswanathan is a fiction writer, playwright and journalist from Edmonton, Alberta. Her writing awards include residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Banff Playwrights' Colony, and first place in the 2006 Boston Review Short Story Contest. She received her Creative Writing MA from Johns Hopkins and her MFA from the University of Arizona, and lives with her family in Fayetteville, Arkansas.