TESSA McWATT is the author of seven novels and two books for young people. Her fiction has been nominated for the Governor General's Award, the City of Toronto Book Awards, the OCM Bocas Prize and the Society of Authors' Volcano Prize. 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 won the Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction 2020 and was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize and the Governor General's Award. She has been a resident at the Sacatar Institute in Brazil and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Italy. Professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia, she is also a librettist, and works on interdisciplinary projects and community-based life writing. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Born in Guyana, she grew up in Canada, and now makes her home in London, England.