Author Jaspreet Singh was a visiting writer at the Michael King Writers’ Centre in March 2015. It was the second time he was resident at the centre, as he also stayed in 2014.
He moved from the Michael King Writers’ Centre to take up a three-month residency at Massey University in Palmerston North. He will appear at the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival in May 2015.
Born in India, Jaspreet Singh moved to Canada in 1990. He is a novelist, essayist, short story writer and a former research scientist. He received his doctorate in chemical engineering in 1998, and two years later decided to focus full time on writing.
Seventeen Tomatoes, his debut story collection, won the 2004 Quebec First Book Prize. Chef, his first novel, about the damaged landscapes of Kashmir, was a 2010 Observer Book of the Year in the UK and won the Canadian Georges Bugnet Prize for Fiction.
His second novel, Helium, tells the story of the 1984 massacres of Sikhs in India, which he witnessed himself as a teenager. His work has been translated into several languages, and he has recently been writing stories for children.
Jaspreet was a visiting writer at the Michael King Writers’ Centre in September. It was his second visit to New Zealand in 2014. He took part in the Writers Festival in Wellington in March. He has been interviewed on National Radio. twice. The interviews can be found here.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/summernights/audio/2582436/author-jaspreet-singh-on-the-ghosts-of-history
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/20151001/jaspreet-singh-on-writing-fiction-about-the-trauma-of-india’s-past
http://www.jaspreetsinghauthor.com/