David Chariandy


David Chariandy is a Canadian writer.
His parents immigrated to Canada from Trinidad in the 1960s. He was born in Scarborough, Ontario.
Chariandy has a MA from Carleton and a PhD from York University. He lives in Vancouver and teaches in the department of English at Simon Fraser University.

Recurring themes and cultural contexts

Chariandy's novels are set in Scarborough, an eastern region of Toronto, Ontario. This area is known for its immigrant heavy population and has been sometime stigmatized by a reputation for crime, although statistics do not support this perception.
Chariandy told the Toronto Star:
If I’m honest, I always wanted to write a story that evoked the complexities of growing up young and Black in Scarborough...Throughout my entire life growing up in Scarborough and returning to it even as a young adult, I always felt so discomforted by the negative stories of Scarborough that would circulate in the newspapers and tabloids and sometimes by word of mouth, among people who really didn’t know Scarborough that well.
His novels offer up a story of Scarborough that admit "challenges, but tell that bigger story of life and vitality that you don’t always see in headlines."
His non-fiction book I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter was inspired by both a racist incident he experienced while at a Vancouver restaurant with his three-year-old daughter and then, years later, by the Quebec City mosque shooting in 2017..

Awards and honors

Chariandy's debut novel, Soucouyant, was published in 2007. It was longlisted for the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the 2008 International Dublin Literary Award; and was shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book of Canada and the Caribbean, the 2008 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the 2008 City of Toronto Book Award, the 2008 ReLit Award for fiction, and the 2007 Books in Canada First Novel Award.
His novel Brother won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in 2017, the Toronto Book Award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize in 2018. This novel tells the story of Michael and his older brother Francis, who grow up in Scarborough, raised by an immigrant mother beleaguered by the financial and social difficulties of single racialized parenthood. The Globe and Mail called it "a supremely moving and exquisitely crafted portrait of his hometown".
Chariandy won the 2019 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize in Fiction.