My Mother, My Translator

In 2008,Jaspreet Singhmade a pact with his mother. He would gladly give her the go-ahead to publish her significantly altered translation of a story from his collection,Seventeen Tomatoes, if she promised to write her memoirs. After she died in 2012, he decided to take up the memoir she had started.My Mother, My Translatoris a deeply personal exploration of a complex relationship. It is a family history, a work of mourning, a meditation on storytelling and silences, and a reckoning with traumathe inherited trauma of the 1947 Partition of India and the direct trauma of the November 1984 anti-Sikh violence Singh experienced as a teenager.

Tracing the men and especially the women of his family from the 1918 pandemic through the calamitous events of Partition,My Mother, My Translatortakes us through Singh's childhood in Kashmir and with his grandparents in Indian Punjab to his arrival in Canada in 1990 to study the sciences, up to the closing moments of 2020, as he tries to locate new forms of stories for living in a present marked by COVID-19 and climate crisis. (From Vehicule Press)

My Mother, My Translator is available in September 2021.

• 57 works of Canadian nonfiction coming out in fall 2021

Jaspreet Singh is the author of thenovelsChef and Helium, thestory collectionSeventeen Tomatoes and thepoetry collectionNovember. His nonfiction has been published in Granta, Brick: A Literary Journal and the New York Times. Singh lives in Calgary.