M. G. Vassanji

M. G. Vassanji is not an author who is easily labelled. He is of South Asian descent and was born in Nairobi, Kenya where he lived until the death of his father. His family then moved to the community of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Vassanji left Dar es Salaam in 1970 to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, investing many years in his career as a physicist. In 1978 he came to Canada and began work at the Chalk River power station. Two years later he became a research associate and lecturer at the University of Toronto. He was reluctant to take his passion for writing as a serious career alternative until he published his first novel, The Gunny Sack, in 1989 and won the 1990 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book in the African region.
Vassanji's novels and short stories draw on his experiences and sense of community and are peopled with the old and young, traditional and modern, and the assimilated and displaced. Thematically, his fiction attempts to connect the past and the present, assimilate traditional and contemporary values, and balance a sense of community with an individual's struggle to belong.
Vassanji is the founder of the Toronto South Asian Review, a nonprofit organization that supports South Asian Canadian writers. He is the editor of their journal, The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad (formerly The Toronto South Asian Review) and contributes his short stories to anthologies and other collections on behalf of the organization.