New Writing

Tessa McWatt is the author of seven novels and two books for young people. Her fiction has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the City of Toronto Book Awards, and the OCM Bocas Prize. Her most recent novel is The Snow Line (Scribe 2021), and she is the co-editor, along with Dionne Brand and Rabindranath Maharaj, of Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada (Cormorant). Her first picture book for children, Where Are You Agnes? (Groundwood Books), is based on the life of abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin. She was one of the winners of the Eccles British Library Award in 2018 for her memoir,  Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, which went on to win the 2020 OCM Bocas Prize and was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards in the Non-Fiction category. Tessa is a Professor of Creative Writing at UEA.