Shani Mootoo was born in Ireland and raised in Trinidad, relocating to Canada in her early twenties. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Western Ontario (now Western University) in 1980 and a Master of Arts in English and Theatre from the University of Guelph in 2010. She practiced initially as a video maker and visual artist—her works having been shown at galleries across here and internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, and in the TransCulture Pavillion of the Venice Biennale in 1995. For the last thirty years Mootoo has concentrated on novel writing, poetry and photo-based work.
She has written one book of short stories, three books of poetry, and six novels and is well anthologised. Her work has been translated into several languages and has been written about by scholars internationally.
Among the novels are Starry Starry Night, Polar Vortex, Cereus Blooms at Night and Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab. She is a four-time nominee for the Giller Prize, and her work has been longlisted for the Booker Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Prize, and the Big Other Book Awards.
Her poetry books include Oh Witness Dey!, Cane | Fire, and The Predicament of Or.
Mootoo has served as writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University, University of Alberta, University of Guelph, University of Toronto, The University of the West Indies, Trinidad, and Mills College, Oakland, California. She was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa from Western University, is a recipient of Lambda Literary’s James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award, The National Library’s Library and Archives Scholar Award, and is the winner of the 2026 Blue Metropolis Violet Literary Prize.
Speaking Topics
The Role of Literature and The Arts in Community Building.
The age-old question of what is the role of the artist in society has come to the fore in the last several years, and raises more questions for us. Can we afford, these days, to be artists for art’s sake? What about the sheer pleasure in making art? When and how does—and should– responsibility to community, to humanity, to speaking up and out take precedence over art making? Does the artist have a role to play in social change, and in society in general?
Writers, filmmakers, and artists in general are story tellers. We tell the stories we know, our own stories, but we also speculate, document, imagine and reimagine the world we have inherited, the one we are living in, and futures awaiting us.
You Are What You Read. You Are What You Watch.
How do we cultivate ways of living and good thinking? The arts encourage us to see ourselves in surprising ways. We recognize aspects of ourselves in characters in books and on the screen and in our ways of handing situations that we could only see through methods of storytelling that aren’t – yet are so very much – about us. But should we only consume what confirms for us our ideas of ourselves and our world, or should be take advantage of the works of artists and writers who are from other places, other cultures, other times? Doing the latter can transport our minds, open them, and widen our worlds.
The Value of Writing and Reading Canadian Literature, The Value of Writing and Reading Beyond Our Borders:
The encouragement of cultural production in Canada has come in various forms with perks to makers and to the industries that support them. We can only be deeply grateful for this. But while such support has fostered artists and the production of their works in various art media, have we become obsessed to a fault with an inward-looking gaze? If so, to what end, and how might we become bigger players on a bigger stage? For starters, reading beyond our experiences, our times and national spaces can not only broaden horizons but bring out greater understanding of lives, locales, cultures and concerns dissimilar to our own.
Testimonials
An accomplished and award-winning writer, Shani Mootoo is also a scintillating platform speaker and thinker, bringing her unique sense of artistry and vision to the talk at hand. I invited her to give a plenary lecture at University College Dublin and proposed her for the same at the University of Marburg, among others, for which she probed the limits of and invited us to reevaluate our assumptions. Her presentations are consistently nuanced, disentangling complexities and offering insight, clarity, and wisdom. – Linda Morra, literature professor and host/writer of award-winning podcast, Getting Lit with Linda
Shani in the Media
Phillips University: Canada Day Keynote
To book Shani Mootoo, contact Rob Firing at speakers@transatlanticagency.com.