about

Oonya Kempadoo is a UK, Guyanese, Grenadian citizen, and a permanent resident of Montreal, Canada. She is the author of four novels and is critically acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. Her semi-autobiographical first novel was long-listed for the Orange Prize and translated into five languages and her second was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and won a Casa De Las Americas prize. Oonya’s work has been selected by Oprah Winfrey’s Summer Reads and she was named a “Great Talent for the 21st Century” by Orange Prize judges. A US Fulbright alumni, she has taught creative writing in the USA, led workshops in the Caribbean, at the Quebec Writers Federation, and has served on several award juries including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Scholastic Arts & Writing Awards (USA & Canada), and Canada Council for the Arts. She is co-founder of the Grenada Community Library and the writing facilitator and editor of The Grenada Chocolate Family, the first children’s chocolate book, written by children of colour in a cocoa-growing country, which won Gourmand’s ‘Best in the World’ award. Oonya’s latest novel of speculative fiction, Naniki (Dundurn, Canada, 2024), won the Guyana Prize for Literature, was longlisted for the Carol Shield’s Prize, is a Governor General’s Literary Award Finalist for Fiction, and a CBC Best Book. Naniki is part of an eco-social story project that she has produced and directed as an immersive multimedia and live performance experience, with the support of Canadian public funds.

As a program and project director, Oonya specializes in development and partnership building. For over 20 years, she has practised this in the arts, in socio-cultural and human development, with various United Nations agencies, non-profit and community organizations.

_{Photo credit: Atiba Cudjoe}