Shauna Singh Baldwin

Born in Montréal, Quebec in 1962 to Indian parents, Baldwin is a Canadian citizen by birth, who was raised in New Delhi, India. She moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States in order to obtain her MBA from Marquette University. She has worked as an independent radio producer, an IT consultant, a web-designer, and as an ESL teacher. She met her husband, a non-Sikh of Irish descent, with whom she owns a spy-themed restaurant, “Safe House,” in Milwaukee. She is a landed immigrant in the United States.

Baldwin co-authored A Foreign Visitor’s Survival Guide to America in 1992 before turning to the fictional genre. Her first work of literary fiction is English Lessons and Other Stories (1995). Her first novel is, What the Body Remembers (1999) for which she received the 2000 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best Book, Canada/Caribbean region. The novel, which was inspired by events from her Grandmother’s history, offers a Sikh account of the 1947 Partition in India - a viewpoint which has not been previously explored in English fiction.

Baldwin’s writing is often political in nature, as she lends voice to members of society who are traditionally silenced. Her work reflects her critical views on oppression, and explores the economic factors which motivate it, often fusing the political with the personal. She is interested in exploring history from the perspective of marginalized characters, often - but not always - women characters. Her writing assumes a global audience and although written in English, is fused with words from other languages for which she consciously does not include a glossary.

Bibliography
Foreign Visitor’s Survival Guide to America (1992)
English Lessons and Other Stories (1995)
What the Body Remembers (1999)
Tiger Claw (2004)
We Are Not in Pakistan (2008)

Awards
Silver Medal, Shastri Award for English Prose (1974)
Writers Union of Canada Award for Short Prose (1995)
CBC Radio/Canada Council Literary Award (1997)
Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best Book, Canada/Caribbean region (2000) For What the Body Remembers

Additionally, her novel What the Body Remembers was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction (2000), and she was nominated for the Giller Prize in 2004 for The Tiger Claw.