Book Written for All the Wrong Reasons Endorsed by Nobel Laureate

When Pakistani-born immigrant Shaista Justin arrived in Canada at the age of six, she struggled with English. Justin could not have imagined then that later proficiency in her adopted tongue would gain the attention of two-time Giller winner MG Vassanji, editor of her book, “Winter, the Unwelcome Visitor,” and that Nobel Prize winner JM Coetzee would endorse it. Hearing of Justin’s endorsement at last year’s Griffin awards, Canadian literary superstar Margaret Atwood exclaimed, “Lucky girl!” Justin agrees, “It’s the literary equivalent of a fairy tale.”

Justin grew up in the grittiest parts of the down-trodden poverty-stricken neighborhood of 1980’s Parkdale in Toronto. “Daily life could be bleak,” she says, “Books were my window into the other lives that were possible.” Almost daily, she rode her bicycle to the Parkdale library where she systematically read through the stacks. “I started at the children’s books and read my way through to poetry, medical textbooks and geography journals”. While outside the library, she was frequently accosted by drug dealers and men offering to pay her for sex – she was twelve at the time.

Her voraciousness for learning led Justin to McMaster University where a love-affair during her 3rd year led to a chance encounter with JM Coetzee. “I fell in love with painter Thomas Cartwright. When he left for Cape Town, South Africa, I had to follow.”

“My father was stony-faced while driving me to the airport. You are going to South Africa for all the wrong reasons, he said. It was true. I knew nothing about South Africa but I invented a research project which allowed me to go study there…really, an excuse to pursue my love-affair,” she smiles mischievously. Arriving in Cape Town, Justin found that her painter had fallen for another woman. The broken-hearted Justin threw herself into her work and found a new love, a life-long passion for the people and haunting political history of South Africa.

Taken under the wing of the University of Cape Town’s English Department Head, John Cartwright, Justin was offered a place to stay and then urged to meet JM Coetzee. Recalling little of their conversation when they first met, Justin walked away with a challenge from Coetzee, that she produce a short story for him in a few short days. After reading it, he offered to conduct a one-on-one creative writing dissertation with the young writer.

Completing her dissertation adequately, but without the approval Justin desired from Coetzee, she began a series of poems while studying with Canadian Poet Jeffery Donaldson. She focused on the inspiration her journey had brought her. Those poems became the 1st of 4 sections in “Winter, the Unwelcome Visitor.” “I really wanted to show him [Coetzee] that I could write,” she recalls, “and I knew that the poems were different, special”. Coetzee’s instantaneous praise of her poetry encouraged her to put together a book.

Seven years later, the completed book went on to win Coetzee’s literary approval and endorsement of her book.

And what happened to the love affair which inspired this momentous chain of events and led to her first book? “Have a look at the cover,” she says enigmatically. Artist Thomas Cartwright provides the painting for the cover.

A book that began for all the wrong reasons, turned out to be published for all the right ones. “Winter” does not only show a tremendous poetic versatility, it is poetic storytelling at its best. Her personal experiences as well as the stories she gathered over a ten-year span, confront and entertain her reader simultaneously.

Always reaching for the next challenge, after launching “Winter, the Unwelcome Visitor” in Spring 2009, Justin wrote and produced “Love and Human Extinction” for the 2009 Toronto Fringe Festival. She is now working on her novel, “The Journal of Yaren Bahareen”, and wrote and is producing her first short film, “Swan Asleep”.

Shaista Justin will be reading next at Johan Hultqvist’s “Free Speech Literary Salon” at the Tinto Coffee House on Roncevalles, Jan. 26th.

For more information, cover imagery or to arrange an interview with Shaista Justin, please contact her publicist Valerie Maloney at valmaloney@gmail.com or 647-236-3609.