By Emily Donaldson - The Globe and Mail 16 May 2018
The past has always plagued M.G. Vassanji's diasporic, mixed-race characters. It haunts and nags, percolating into their lives in inconvenient ways until the inevitable reckoning. Read more
by Zane Schwartz - Maclean's 1 October 2016
Vassanji built his reputation as one of CanLit’s favourite sons with novels focused on colonialism, immigration and the search for identity in a cruel, complex world. His latest book tries to carry those themes into a new genre, dystopian fiction. Nostalgia is set in a futuristic Toronto where the rich live forever by erasing their memories and implanting new ones. Vassanji describes it in the novel as a search for immortality, but that is a stretch. Read more
Giles Foden - The Guardian 6 September 2008
MG Vassanji is one of the unsung greats of African literature. An Ismaili Muslim of Gujarati heritage, born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania, he attended the University of Nairobi before winning a scholarship to MIT to study nuclear physics. In 1978 he moved to Canada to work at the Ontario nuclear research facility. He began his literary career two years later. So far, his writing has focused on the experience of south Asians in east Africa. This mainly merchant community has been around since the 1850s, but trade has existed between the two continents since at least the 13th century. It was a Gujarati sea pilot who led Vasco da Gama from Kenya to India in 1498. Read more