Tessa McWatt

TESSA McWATT is the author of seven novels and two books for young people. Her fiction and non-fiction have been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the City of Toronto Book Awards, and the OCM Bocas Prize. She is the co-editor, along with Dionne Brand and Rabindranath Maharaj, of Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada. Her first picture book for children, Where Are You Agnes?, is based on the life of abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin. She is one of the winners of the Eccles British Library Award 2018, for her memoir: Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, which also won the Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction 2020 and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. She is also a librettist and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her new book, The Snag: A Mother, A Forest and Wild Grief, is a lament for the planet and a plea for change. It was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize 2025 and won the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for Non-Fiction 2026. Born in Guyana, and raised in Canada, she lives in London.