Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand was born on 7 January 1953 in Guayaguayare, the southernmost village in Trinidad and Tobago. As a girl she sent poems to the newspapers under the pen name Xavier Simone, an homage to Nina Simone, whose music she listened to on the radio late at night. After graduating from Naparima Girls' High School she moved to Toronto in 1970 and earned a BA at the University of Toronto and a master's degree at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

Her first book of poems, Fore Day Morning, was published in 1978. She went on to publish ten volumes of poetry, which are marked by formal and linguistic experiment and by candid accounts of the immigrant experience in Canada. Land to Light On (1997) won the Governor General's Award for Poetry and the Trillium Book Award, thirsty (2002) won the Pat Lowther Award, and Ossuaries (2010) won the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Brand is also a distinguished novelist and essayist. Her first novel, In Another Place, Not Here, was named a New York Times Notable Book, and her novel What We All Long For won the 2006 Toronto Book Award. Her non-fiction includes A Map to the Door of No Return, a meditation on the Black diaspora. She has also worked as a documentary filmmaker and community activist.

From September 2009 to November 2012 she served as Toronto's third Poet Laureate, and its first Black poet laureate. She was poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart from 2017 to 2021 and is a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

Her honours include the Harbourfront Festival Prize in 2006, a fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada, six honorary doctorates, the Order of Canada in 2017, the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for fiction in 2021 and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She lives in Toronto.