Event Details
Three distinct voices examine the histories, identities, and connections that shape Caribbean storytelling.
Event Details
Three distinct voices examine the histories, identities, and connections that shape Caribbean storytelling.
Speakers for this event
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Andrea Gunraj
Andrea Gunraj
Andrea Gunraj is an essayist and writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her latest book, Go-Between Girl: My Indentured Roots as Reclaimed Present, was released by McClelland & Stewart in 2026. She is also author of The Lost Sister (Vagrant Press, 2019) and The Sudden Disappearance of Seetha (Knopf Canada, 2009). She lives in Toronto and loves to write about underseen stories and connections. Visit andreagunraj.ca.
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Myrtle Henry Sodhi
Myrtle Henry Sodhi
Myrtle Henry Sodhi is an award winning transdisciplinary artist-scholar whose work examines the racialized and gendered dimensions of labour, wellbeing, and care in educational and workplace contexts. Her novel, We’ve Been Here Before, extends her scholarly interest in storytelling, voice reclamation, and the labour experiences of Afro-Caribbean women.
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Pamela Mordecai
Pamela Mordecai
The Globe and Mail’s Jim Bartley said Pamela Mordecai’s first short story collection, Pink Icing was characterised by “an unexpected yet highly fluid mix of picaresque humour and unsparing human observation.” The jury for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize described her novel, Red Jacket, which was shortlisted in 2015, as “a bawdy meditation on storytelling and the art of writing.” The jury for the OCM BOCAS prize for Caribbean Literature described her poetry collection, de book of Joseph as a “stunning linguistic and prosodic achievement.” Mordecai was born in Jamaica, and educated there, and in the USA. She lives in Toronto.
Books
Go-Between Girl: My Indentured Roots as Reclaimed Present
The under-told legacy of indentured servitude runs through the blood of countless descendants in the diaspora. In Go-Between Girl: My Indentured Roots as Reclaimed Present, Andrea Gunraj explores the impact of her family’s history on her sense of self.
Andrea delves into the under-told legacy of indentured labour and its lasting impacts on descendants across diasporas, from the Caribbean and Latin America to Canada, the United States, and beyond. She captures the complexities of belonging and the challenges of navigating dichotomies. Through the concept of “go-betweenness,” Gunraj illustrates her path from the intersections of race, class, and identity to a broader understanding of colonial histories.
A gripping read that weaves memoir with history and cultural criticism, Go-Between Girl is both accessible and profound, intimate and political. Gunraj invites readers to reconsider their narratives about work, love, and heritage. Her essays are a touching testament to the enduring quest for justice, offering a powerful contribution to contemporary conversations on race, feminism, and the unfinished legacies of colonialism.
AuthorAndrea Gunraj
PublisherMcClelland & Stewart
Two Days in Mayaro: Stories
Only two months in Toronto, a young man gets in trouble at school for being restless and disruptive. A stone-throwing duppy smashes an elderly couple’s car window as they drive past a graveyard. An 80-year-old woman goes to great lengths to get the sugar needed to bake a cake for a soon-to-be-arriving visitor.
Two Days in Mayaro brings together a new collection of stories that showcases the astonishing range and depth of Pamela Mordecai’s writing. Set largely in the Jamaican diaspora, Mordecai’s stories are alive with sound and often driven by dazzling yet subtle reimaginings of lore, ancestry, and history.
Mordecai’s characters cope with the universal experiences of birth and death, joy and betrayal, reckoning with both their present and past. In this multidimensional universe, Mordecai mixes Jamaican Patwa with standard English and profanity with reverence, making her characters all the more real by introducing uncanny detail at just the right moment or by turning confusion on its head to make us laugh.
AuthorPamela Mordecai
PublisherGoose Lane Editions
We've Been Here Before
For readers of Homegoing and Frying Plantain, a stirring intergenerational saga stretching from the Caribbean to Canada where womanhood and mothering demands what the body wants to forget.
Woven together with folklore and memory, We’ve Been Here Before begins with the childhood stories of Lise-Rose, who struggles with speech and coming of age in a community anchored in both West African spirituality and the Catholic Church. Lise-Rose must choose either to follow the ancestral ways of her father, who is spiritually bound to the sea, or her mother, who has rooted herself in Catholicism. The path of her life changes, however, after an encounter with a shape-shifting figure from the village.
Like Lise-Rose’s ancestors, her descendants struggle to honour ancestral knowledge while living on foreign lands. Margaux, Lise-Rose’s great-granddaughter, embarks on a new life with her mother in Canada. Facing racism and isolation, they attempt to establish roots in a country that seems both limitless and oppressive.
Across generations, Sodhi explores how a woman reclaims a connection to her stories and ancestors while forging her own voice.
AuthorMyrtle Henry Sodhi
PublisherDundurn Press
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