Mariam Pirbhai is a creative writer and academic. She is the author of a book of creative nonfiction titled Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023), a novel titled Isolated Incident (Mawenzi 2022), and a short story collection, Outside People and Other Stories (Inanna, 2017), winner of the 2018 IPPY Gold Medal and 2019 AmericanBookFest Award. Her creative writing has appeared in anthologies such as Her Mother’s Ashes, Volume III: Stories by South Asian Women in Canada and the United States (TSAR/Mawenzi), and literary journals such as The New Quarterly, jaggerylit and the Dalhousie Review. She is also the author of an academic monograph, Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific (University of Toronto Press, 2009), and co-editor of a scholarly collection of essays, Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature (Routledge 2013). Pirbhai served as the President of CAPS (the Canadian Association for Postcolonial Studies, formerly CACLALS). She is Full Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she specializes in and teaches postcolonial and diaspora studies, BIPOC writing, and creative writing. She lives and works in the Grand River region.
