MONTREAL – M.G. Vassanji’s fiction has been heaped with critical acclaim, but it was his non-fiction debut that grabbed the spotlight Tuesday as the Toronto writer won a Governor General’s Literary Award.
“A Place Within: Rediscovering India” is a deeply personal exploration of the author’s roots, a topic Vassanji says he couldn’t resist tackling.
“It chose me,” he said at a news conference.
An African by birth, Vassanji had heard stories about India from his ancestors but only visited there as an adult in 1993, with the journey turning into a true story of self-discovery.
“It sort of bowled me over,” he said of the trip. “Discovering India was part of discovering myself, who I was, where I came from … where in this India does my background fit in.
“It raised many questions – it was thrilling, it was painful. It just did many things,” he said, pointing out it took him a long time and many trips back to India to finish the book.
“Curiosity led me on and on until I somehow had a sense of how to approach this subject and the only way I could approach it was to make it a very personal book so I was not really writing about India, but myself in India.”
In 1994, Vassanji won the inaugural Scotiabank Giller Prize (then called the Giller Prize) for his novel “The Book of Secrets.”
Ismailimail 
Congratulations!
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Another well deserved accolade! Congratulations! Wa wa! Bravo!
I thoroughly enjoyed reading A Place Within. I started by going straight to page 233 to the chapter titled “Gujarat: Down Ancestral Roads, Fearfully”.
I also enjoyed reading, at page 215, how Mulk Raj Anand, the renowned Indian writer was born into an Ismaili family and is actually related by marriage to M. G. Vassanji.
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