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.
Award History
2013 Finalist
Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfictionfor Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother
Jury 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)
