Mariam Pirbhai is an academic and creative writer. She is the author the debut short-story collection Outside PEOPLE AND OTHER STORIES (winner of the 2018 IPPY Gold Medal for Multicultural Fiction, winner of the 2019 American BookFest Award for the Short Story, and ranked among CBC's top ten must read books of 2017). She is also the author and editor of several academic works, including Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific and Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women's Literature. Pirbhai is Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she teaches and specializes in postcolonial studies and creative writing. Pirbhai is the daughter of Pakistani immigrants whose arrival in Canada followed a circuitous route from England, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines. She and her husband live in Waterloo, Ontario. ISOLATED INCIDENT is her first novel.