Keynote Speakers

Gujarat Studies Association

Conference 2010 - SOAS, University of London

Keynote Speakers

GSA is delighted that both Professor Angela Creese and M.G. Vassanji will be delivering the keynote addresses at the 2010 conference.

Professor Angela Creese, University of Birmingham

Prof. Creese’ research is on multilingualism in schools where she is interested in both the ideological and interactional simultaneously. She also has a long standing interest in teacher collaboration and discourses in multilingual urban schools.

On-going work funded by the UK research council (ESRC) on complementary schools investigates participants' linguistic repertoires and identities and considers how these are institutionally and socially framed.

For further details see both the links below:

http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/esrcinfocentre/viewawardpage.aspx?awardnumber=RES-000-23-1180

Report on Multilingualism in Gujarati Complementary Schools in Leicester

M.G. Vassanji

Moyez Gulamhussein Vassanji was born in Nairobi and raised in Tanzania before leaving for MIT to study nuclear physics and completing a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1978 he moved to Canada and he currently resides in Toronto.

As a writer, his focus has been on the South Asians in East Africa as well as their migration onwards to the West. Though few of his characters ever return to India, the country's presence looms throughout his work; his 2007 novel ‘The Assassins Song’, however, is set almost entirely in India, where it was received as an Indian novel.

Vassanji's work has received considerable critical acclaim. ‘The Gunny Sack’ won a regional Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1990. In 1994, he won the Harbourfront Festival Prize in recognition of his "achievement in and contribution to the world of letters." That year he was also one of twelve Canadians chosen for Maclean's Magazine's Honour Roll. In 2005, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada.

Vassanji won the inaugural Giller Prize in 1994 for ‘The Book of Secrets’. He again won the Giller Prize in 2003 for ‘The In-Between World of Vikram Lall’. He was the first writer to win the Giller Prize more than once. In 2006, ‘When She Was Queen’ was shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award and his latest work, ‘The Assassin's Song’ was short-listed for the 2007 Giller Prize.

Vassanji received the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction for his book "A Place Within: Rediscovering India," at a ceremony on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 in Montreal.