Photo: © Steve Haskett
Anita Rau Badami is an award-winning novelist who was born in Rourkela, Odisha, India, in 1961 before moving to Canada in 1991. Her novels, which have been translated into more than a dozen languages worldwide, deal with the complexities of family life and issues associated with immigration to the West. Her use of humour and the memorable characters she has created have helped expand the understanding of the Canadian experience and the cultural heritage of our country.
Ms. Badami published her first story when she was only 18. After graduating university, where she studied English Literature, followed by a graduate diploma in Social Communications Media, she worked as a freelance writer before moving to Canada and earning her M.A. in English Literature at the University of Calgary. Her graduate thesis became her first novel, Tamarind Mem (1996), which explores the complicated forces of memory and familial expectation.
Ms. Badami’s second novel, The Hero’s Walk (2001), tells the story of an ordinary Indian man who has to care for his Canadian granddaughter after the sudden death of her parents. It won the Regional Commonwealth Writers’ Best Book Award and Italy’s Premio Berto. It was longlisted for both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction). It was also shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize and a finalist for the 2016 Canada Reads competition.
Both Ms. Badami’s third and fourth novels were also longlisted for the IMPAC Award. Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (2006), which was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award, moves between Canada and India and explores the conflicts among ordinary people caused by major events such as the Partition of India in 1947 and the 1985 Air India bombing. Tell It to the Trees (2012), about the silence surrounding domestic abuse, was a finalist for the OLA Evergreen Award.
In 2000, Ms. Badami was the youngest recipient ever of the Marian Engel Award, which recognizes a Canadian woman author in mid-career. She is currently working on her fifth novel, tentatively titled It Is As It Is, as well as co-authoring the non-fiction book Mixed Borders: An exchange between countries and continents.
Ms. Badami was the Chair of the 2017 Giller Prize and has served as a juror for the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction, the Writer’s Trust Prize and the inaugural 2023 Carol Shields Prize.
