Camilla Gibb

Camilla Gibb is the author of three novels and several short stories. One of the themes that pervades her work is that of belonging. Gibb moved to Toronto from London, England with her family when she was a child, and knows “what it is to grow up in a place you have no historical connection to, no family beyond the immediate, no real attachment to a place beyond what you experience in the here and now.”

What it means to be an outsider is explored most thoroughly in Gibb's third novel, Sweetness in the Belly. The reader encounters the ancient walled city of Harar, Ethiopia, through the eyes of Lilly, a young woman who is both white and Muslim and a stranger to the city.

Gibb completed a B.A. in anthropology at the University of Toronto, with a specialization in Middle Eastern studies. While pursuing a Ph.D. through the University of Oxford, she lived for a year with a family in Harar, conducting research for her doctoral dissertation. However, it was her earlier friendship with a fellow undergraduate student, who was an Ethiopian refugee attending the University of Toronto on a scholarship that was the inspiration for Sweetness. Gibb chose to set the novel in the 1970's in order to “capture the moment before Ethiopia was lost to the rest of the world and look at the experiences of refugees who fled during the dictatorship - experiences like those of my friend.” Gibb wrote the majority of the novel envisioning Lilly as a child. When she realized the novel needed to be told from the point of view of an adult, she was forced to undertake massive rewrites. In the end, only five of the original 400 pages submitted to her editor survived intact.

Camilla Gibb has served as writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto and the University of Alberta, as well as vice-president of PEN Canada. She is currently an adjunct faculty member in the Creative Writing program at the University of Toronto.

Publications
Sweetness in the Belly (2005)
The Petty Details of So-and-so's Life (2002)
Mouthing the Words (1999)

Awards
Longlisted: Dublin IMPAC Literary Award (2007) - for Sweetness in the Belly
Trillium Book Award (2006) - for Sweetness in the Belly
Shortlist: Scotiabank Giller Prize (2005) - for Sweetness in the Belly
CBC Canadian Literary Award for Short Fiction (2001) - for the short story “Between Wars”
City of Toronto Book Award (2000) - for Mouthing the Words