Shashi Bhat

Shashi Bhat

Shashi Bhat is the author of the story collection Death by a Thousand Cuts, the novel The Most Precious Substance on Earth (a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction), and The Family Took Shape (a finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award). Her fiction has won the Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and appeared in such publications as The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Best Canadian Stories, and The Journey Prize Stories. Bhat lives in New Westminster, BC, where she is the editor-in-chief of EVENT magazine and teaches creative writing at Douglas College.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

A breathtaking and sharply funny collection about the everyday trials and impossible expectations that come with being a woman.

What would have happened if she’d met him at a different time in her life, when she was older, more confident, less lonely, and less afraid? She wonders not whether they would have stayed together, but whether she would have known to stay away.

A writer discovers that her ex has published a novel about their breakup. An immunocompromised woman falls in love, only to have her body betray her. After her boyfriend makes an insensitive comment, a college student finds an experimental procedure that promises to turn her brown eyes blue. A Reddit post about a man’s habit of grabbing his girlfriend’s breasts prompts a shocking confession. An unsettling second date leads to the testing of boundaries. And when a woman begins to lose her hair, she embarks on an increasingly nightmarish search for answers.

With honesty, tenderness, and a skewering wit, these stories boldly wrestle with rage, longing, illness, bodily autonomy, and their inescapable impacts on a woman’s relationships with others and with herself.

BE CURIOUSER

Short Fiction by Shashi Bhat: The Most Precious Substance on Earth. –The New Quarterly

Shashi Bhat’s new book of stories finds humour in the everyday trials of being a woman. –CBC Books

Interview: The author of Death by a Thousand Cuts on the importance of reading and writing short stories. –Girls on the Page

FESTIVAL SHOWS

Turtle Island Reads (New Show)

Literary Death Match

Death by a Thousand Cuts