Shree Ghatage

Shree Ghatage was born in Bombay [Mumbai], India. She came to Canada in the early 1980s and lived in Altantic Canada (St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador) for fifteen years. She now resides in Calgary, Alberta.

Fiction (Short stories)

Awake When all the World is Asleep: Stories

Concord, ON: Anansi, 1997.
PS8563 .H37 A82 1997

Publisher’s Synopsis

It is the mid-seventies, and Shaila has returned to Bombay for her father’s sixtieth birthday party. In the linked stories that follow, Shree Ghatage renders an India that can only be revealed by first leaving, and then returning again — in the end, for Shaila, for good.

Awards and Honours

1998 Danuta Gleed Literary Award (Nominated)
1998 Emerging Artist Award in Newfoundland and Labrador (Nominated)
1998 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award (Nominated)
1998 Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award (Winner)

Fiction

Brahma’s Dream: A Novel

Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2004.
PS8563 .H37 B73 2004

Publisher’s Synopsis

Set in Bombay amid the turbulence of India’s surge towards self-rule, Brahma’s Dream relates the story of thirteen-year-old Mohini, an unforgettable character whose medical problems and special wisdom set her apart from the world around her….

A joyous and moving novel, astute and reflective, Brahma’s Dream explores the Hindu belief that all life is part of a vast continuum, and that momentous political and social changes, birth, suffering, even death, are only as a twinkling in the eye of a god.

Awards and Honours

2004 Starred review in Quill & Quire (July 2004)

Fiction

Thirst

Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2012.
Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2013.
PS8563 .H37 T47 2013

Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)

Thirst is about many forms of desire–and most particularly, at its heart, about love unexpectedly found and lost during a difficult time (WWII) and in an unlikely spot: within a hastily arranged union between two young people who begin their marriage as complete strangers. The lovers are Vasanti, an intelligent woman who has nonetheless grown up naive and protected; and Baba, the scion of a prominent Brahmin family who longs to study in London, thus escaping the family compound in Nagpur. The novel moves between the lushness of India and the sombre grayness of London during the Blitz, even as Ghatage brilliantly unwinds the story of two conflicted people who, slowly but surely, learn to tolerate, then like, then passionately love each other just as their worlds fall apart.

Anthology (Short stories)

Her Mother’s Ashes 2

PS8329 .H472 1998

Ghatage, Shree.  “The Mango Tree.” In Her Mother’s Ashes 2: More Stories by South Asian Women in Canada and the United States, edited by Nurjehan Aziz.  Toronto: TSAR, 1998.

Selected Criticism and Interpretation

Chilana, Rajwant Singh. “Shree Ghatage.” In South Asian Writers in Canada: A Bio-Bibliographical Study. Surrey, BC: Asian Publications, 2017, 286-287.
Z1376 .S68 C45 2017