Shani Mootoo and Rob Winger

Please join us to celebrate the Ottawa launch of acclaimed Trinidadian-Canadian author Shani Mootoo's new novel Valmiki's Daughter & a reading by award winning Ottawa poet Rob Winger at The Manx Pub (370 Elgin).

In Valmiki's Daughter, Giller Prize finalist and bestselling novelist Shani Mootoo returns to some of the themes she first explored in her breakout book, Cereus Blooms at Night. The story circles around a well-to-do Trinidadian family, in particular, Valmiki, a renowned doctor and loving if confused father, and his youngest daughter, Viveka, lively, intelligent, and intent on escaping the gilded cage that protects but also smothers her. Father and daughter conceal painful secrets about their sexual identities, and it is Viveka's struggle to discover the truth about herself that threatens to unmask her father and shake the foundations of her family and her delicately calibrated society.

Mootoo writes with an unusual combination of clear-eyed affection and expansive humanity about society and its hierarchies, peeling back layers of prejudice and exposing the complex interaction of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

Rob Winger grew up in a tiny Ontario town, and has since lived in eastern Canada and Asia. His work has been published in literary journals across the country and his long poem, Muybridges Horse, was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 2007.