Jaspreet Singh (novelist)

Science and a writing career

Jaspreet Singh grew up in India and moved to Canada in 1990, according to the Quebec Writers’ Federation. The Federation records a PhD in chemical engineering from McGill University alongside a literary career in stories and novels. Its book records identify Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir as fiction published in 2004 and winner of its First Book Prize. They also identify Chef, published in 2008, as a finalist for the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. These are dated records attached to particular books within an English-language writing career.[1]

A mother and translation

Toronto Metropolitan University’s library guide identifies a different form of exchange in My Mother, My Translator. Singh’s mother translated Seventeen Tomatoes into Punjabi, while he worked on translating her memorial writing into English. The guide explicitly identifies his Granta essay as part of the memoir. Its reproduced publisher synopsis follows a family history through Partition, a childhood in Kashmir and time with grandparents in Indian Punjab, before the move to Canada. The 2021 Véhicule Press publication thus connects acts of translation with the shaping of remembered lives. Those narrative settings are the publisher’s description of the memoir, rather than an independent family archive.[2]

Research, fiction and a residency

Stephen Hunt’s 2022 interview links the novel Face with a different kind of research. Singh recalled a 2018 visit to northern Germany, where he shadowed a glaciologist and a marine researcher and encountered ice-core and sediment-core archives. He described that physical contact with traces of deep time as a turning point in the novel’s creation. Hunt also presents its narrator, Lila, as a science journalist navigating competing public stories about climate. Singh explicitly distinguished this imaginative engagement from professional climate expertise: his earlier scientific work belonged to another discipline. The interview records how a writer approached unfamiliar research settings and transformed the encounter into fiction.[3]

Fondation Jan Michalski’s record dates his residency to 5 February–24 June 2020. Its announcements for later books are plans, without establishing publication.[4]