Priscila
Uppal
Dubbed “Canada’s coolest poet” by Time Out London, Priscila Uppal was Olympic poet-in-residence at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games and the 2012 London Summer Games. Born in Ottawa, she worked as a literature and creative writing professor at Toronto’s York University. Her collection of poetry Ontological Necessities was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2007.
Writers & Books
Award History
2013 - Finalist
Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction
for Projection: Encounters with My Runaway MotherJury Citation
“When scholar and writer Priscila Uppal travels to Brazil to reunite with her mother, the result is a narrative that is bizarre, hilarious, and poignantly painful. Uppal attempts to circumnavigate the truth and lies around the circumstances that caused her mother to abandon 8-year-old Uppal, her brother, and her quadriplegic father more than thirty years ago. But the deeper she goes into the past, the more she is confronted with a haunting mirror image of herself. How much of her mother’s tangled web of self-absorbed, Hollywood-inflected dramas has seeped into her own essential nature?” – 2013 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction Jury (Hal Niedzviecki, Candace Savage, and Andreas Schroeder)Juror History
Works Recognized by WT