Tessa McWatt

McWatt was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and moved to Canada with her family when she was three years old.^[1] She was raised in Toronto, where her family embraced the Canadian outdoors through camping, skiing, and canoeing.^[4] As a child, McWatt was interested in music, sports, and literature.^[1] Even as a child she knew she wanted to be a writer.^[1]

McWatt studied English literature at Queen's University and then earned her MA degree at the University of Toronto.^[1] Her MA focused on post-colonial literature and explored subject matter like how outsiders are perceived within society and how there are conflicting ideas regarding belonging.

After university, McWatt found employment as an editor and college instructor, while living in Montreal, Paris, and Ottawa.^[1] In 1999, she moved to London, England, where she taught creative writing and wrote.^[1] She is presently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK.^[5]

McWatt is the author of novels, stories, essays and libretto, along with There's No Place Like... (2004) a novella for young adults.

Her first novel was Out of My Skin, the story of an adopted Canadian woman seeking her roots (1998; second edition Cormorant Books, 2012). Her second novel, Dragons Cry (2001), was shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Awards and the Canadian Governor General's Literary Awards.^[6][7] Her other novels include This Body (HarperCollins, 2004, and Macmillan Caribbean, 2005), Step Closer (HarperCollins 2009), Vital Signs (Random House Canada 2011 and William Heinemann, 2012), which was nominated for the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Higher Ed (Random House Canada and Scribe UK, 2015)^[8] and The Snow Line (Random House Canada and Scribe UK, 2021), nominated for the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize.

McWatt provided the libretto for Hannah Kendall's 2016 opera The Knife of Dawn, based on the incarceration of political activist Martin Carter in the then British Guiana in 1953.^[9][10]

She is the co-editor, along with Dionne Brand and Rabindranath Maharaj, of Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada (Cormorant Books, 2018).^[11]

McWatt was one of the winners of the Eccles British Library Award 2018^[12] for her critical memoir Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, which was also shortlisted for the 2020 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction,^[13] the 2020 Canadian Governor General's Literary Awards for Non-Fiction, and it was the Non-Fiction Winner of the 2020 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

Her most recent book of non-fiction is The Snag: A Mother, A Forest and Wild Grief (Random House Canada and Scribe UK 2025), about which Cassandra Drudi wrote in Quill & Quire: "It is a story about confronting the changing stages of life, as McWatt travels back and forth between the United Kingdom and Canada to support her family as they grapple with the change in their mother's living situation.... But the personal dovetails with a larger story about the collective grief of humanity as the climate crisis continues to make its presence known with forest fires, devastating heatwaves, droughts, floods, and melting ice sheets."^[14] The book won the non-fiction category of the 2026 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.^[15]

• McWatt, Tessa (18 July 2008). "But the rose fell on Azor's Paw". Wasafiri. 17 (35): 51–56. doi:10.1080/02690050208589774. S2CID 162914405.
• McWatt, Tessa (3–23 April 2020). "The slave and master inside me". Personal Story. New Statesman. 149 (5514): 52.
• Taneja, Preti; Tessa McWatt (22 October 2020). "SHAME ON ME: Professor Tessa McWatt in Conversation with Dr Preti Taneja". Feminist Review. 126 (1): 139–145. doi:10.1177/0141778920942761.