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Soraya Peerbaye

Soraya Peerbaye’s work has appeared in Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets and in some Canadian literary magazines. Her parents moved to Canada from Mauritius and she was born London, Ontario. Peerbaye works as a writer and translator. She has worked for radio and film and completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. Peerbaye now lives in Toronto, Ontario and works as an arts consultant.
Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names book cover

Poetry

Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names

Fredericton, N.B.: Goose Lane Editions, 2009.
PS8631 .E395 P64 2009

Publisher’s Synopsis

… Peerbaye explores in exquisite detail the material and the ephemeral, from the intricacies of objects owned by her father, and the habits that animate them, to the landscape and residents of the Antarctic Peninsula. Throughout, she weaves a poetic treatise on the meaning of naming and gesture, and how they can express possession and power, or kinship, inquisitiveness, and love.

Awards and Honours

2010 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award— League of Canadian Poets (Shortlist)

Tell book cover

Poetry

Tell: Poems for a Girlhood

St. John’s, NL.: Pedlar Press, 2015.
PS8631 .E395 T45 2015

Publisher’s Synopsis (from its website)

A collection of poems partially based on the Reena Virk murder case. Virk was an Asian adolescent whose drowned body was found in the Gorge Waterway in a Victoria, BC suburb, in 1997. Some of the poems use found material from court transcripts. The murder made international headlines due to the viciousness employed by Virk’s assailants: seven girls and one boy between the ages of 13 and 16, five of whom were white. The poems examine in part the poet’s remembrances of girlhood, the unease of adolescence, and the circumstances that enable some to pass through unhurt.

Awards and Honours

2016 Griffin Poetry Prize–Canadian (Finalist)

2016 Trillium Book Award for Poetry in English (Winner)

Anthologies (Poetry)

Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets

Edited by Rishma Dunlop & Priscilla Uppal.
Toronto: Mansfield Press, 2004.
PS8283 .A8 R43 2004

Links

Publisher Goose Lane Editions

Publisher Pedlar Press