Priscila Uppal (1974-2018) was a Canadian poet and fiction writer of South Asian descent. Born in Ottawa in 1974, was a professor of Humanities and English at York University in Toronto. Her first UK poetry selection Successful Tragedies: Poems 1998-2010 (Bloodaxe Books, 2010) drew on six collections of poetry published in Canada: How to Draw Blood From a Stone (1998), Confessions of a Fertility Expert (1999), Pretending to Die (2001), Live Coverage (2003), Holocaust Dream (with photographs by Daniel Ehrenworth, 2005), Ontological Necessities (2006; shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize) and Traumatology (2009), and was followed by Sabotage (Bloodaxe Books, 2015). Her other books include the novels The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002) and To Whom It May Concern (2009), and the critical study We Are What We Mourn: The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy (2009). She also edited the multilingual Exile Book of Poetry in Translation: 20 Canadian Poets Take On the World (2009). Her work has been published internationally and translated into Croatian, Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Korean and Latvian. She was the first-ever poet-in-residence for Canadian Athletes Now during the 2010 Vancouver and 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games as well as the Rogers Cup Tennis Tournament in 2011. Six Essential Questions, her first play, had its World Premiere as part of the Factory Theatre 2013-2014 season. Her memoir, Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother (Thomas Allen Publishers, 2013), on which the play is based, was nominated for both the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Hilary Weston Prize for Non-Fiction (the largest prize for non-fiction in Canada). During a long period of treatment for cancer she co-edited Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem Anthology with Meaghan Strimas, published by Mansfield Press in 2018. For more information please visit www.priscilauppal.ca
