Congratulations to Anuja Varghese who won the Governor General's Award for Fiction for her short story collection Chrysalis.
SCS learner Anuja Varghese completed her creative writing certificate in September 2023. Hot on the heels of that achievement, this brilliant member of our creative writing community has won this year’s Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction for her short story collection, Chrysalis.
A top honour in Canadian literature, the Governor General’s Literary Awards were created in 1936 to celebrate literature and inspire people to read books by creators from Canada. The award recognizes the best books in English and French in seven categories: Fiction; Non-fiction; Poetry; Drama; Young People’s Literature – Text; Young People’s Literature – Illustrated Books; and, Translation.
We sat down with Varghese earlier this year to hear about her experience going from SCS learner to published writer and she described Chrysalis as a collection of genre-blending short stories that centre women and girls of colour, and explore community, sexuality, cultural expectations, and moments of transformation through a feminist lens.
“When I think about what inspired me to write these stories – two things come to mind. The first is that I wanted to write brown girl characters who break free of the roles they are often ascribed in media (typically immigrants, nerds, victims, and sidekicks), and who reflect the intersections of identity that I experience as a second generation queer woman of colour,” she explains. “The second is that I was writing both literary fiction and genre fiction and I wanted to create a collection that made space for both.”
When pressed to choose a favourite story from her collection, she instead refered us to the dedication page in Chrysalis, which reads, “This book is for all the girls and women who don’t see themselves in most stories. You are worthy of reflection, despite what you have been told. Reflection in this context can mean two things: a throwing back or mirroring of; and worthy of serious consideration.”