Cecil Foster - WikiHQ

Cecil Foster (born September 26, 1954) is a Canadian novelist, essayist, journalist, Public intellectual and scholar. He is Chairman of the Department of Transnational Studies at the University at Buffalo.

Early life and education

Foster was born in Bridgetown, Barbados on 26 September 1954 to Fred and Doris Goddard. When Foster was two years old, his parents migrated to Britain, leaving their children with relatives. The family was extremely poor; Foster remembers a childhood where there was rarely enough to eat. He immigrated to Canada in 1978. Foster completed his PhD at York University in 2002.

He is a well-regarded novelist. Foster served as a judge for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

He won the Writers' Trust of Canada's Gordon Montador Award in 1997 for his book A Place Called Heaven for the Best Canadian Book on Contemporary Social Issues, the novel “Sleep On, Beloved” was shortlisted for the Ontario Trillium Book Prize, and “Blackness and Modernity: The Colour of Humanity and the Quest for Freedom” (McGill-Queen’s UP 2007), won the 2008 John Porter Tradition of Excellence Book Award by the Canadian Sociology Association.

In 2019 he published the non-fiction book They Called Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada, a study of the history of Black Canadian train porters. Writer Suzette Mayr consulted the book as part of her research for her Giller Prize-winning 2022 novel The Sleeping Car Porter.

Books

No Man in the House - 1991
Distorted mirror: Canada’s Racist Face - 1991
Caribana, the Greatest Celebration - 1995 (about Caribana)
Sleep On, Beloved - 1995
A Place Called Heaven: The Meaning of Being Black in Canada - 1996
Slammin' Tar - 1998
Island Wings: A Memoir - 1998
Dry Bones Memories - 2001
Where Race Does Not Matter: The New Spirit of Modernity - 2004
Blackness and Modernity: The Colour of Humanity and the Quest for Freedom - 2007
Genuine Multiculturalism: The Tragedy and Comedy of Diversity - 2013
Independence - 2014