Outside People and Other Stories by Mariam Pirbhai
Winner, American Book Fest 2019 Best Book Awards (Fiction – Short Story)
Winner, 2018 IPPY Gold Medal for Multicultural Fiction
A Haitian woman survives the ravages of an earthquake only to find her sister, an émigré in Montreal, the subject of a grisly crime. A chambermaid in a Mexican tourist resort frequented by Canadian tourists wonders why all the men in her life seem to leave her for distant lands. A Jamaican migrant worker at an Ontario chicken farm comes to the aid of his Peruvian co-worker on the eve of a fatal car accident. And a young Pakistani-Canadian woman finds herself in the midst of a protest march defending Muslim women’s rights on the same day she has agreed to meet her Moroccan lover.
The diverse cast of characters that energize Mariam Pirbhai’s Outside People and Other Stories not only reflects a multicultural Canada but also the ease with which this striking debut collection inhabits the voices and perspectives of nation, hemisphere, and world.
MARIAM PIRBHAI is an academic and creative writer. She is the author of a newly released book of creative nonfiction titled Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023), a debut novel titled Isolated Incident (Mawenzi 2022) and a short story collection titled Outside People and Other Stories (Inanna 2017), winner of the 2018 International Independent Publishers’ and American BookFest awards. She is Full Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she specializes in postcolonial literatures, diaspora studies and creative writing. She is the author and editor of book-length studies on the global South Asian diaspora and its literatures, including Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific (University of Toronto Press, 2009). She has served as the President of the Canadian Association for Postcolonial Studies (formerly known as CACLALS, the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies), and is deeply committed to decolonizing the way we think about and teach literature and creative writing. She was born in Pakistan and lives in Waterloo, ON.
