It will take me weeks, maybe months to find the best words to describe my amazement. Dionne Brand’s latest novel explores the life of a brilliant thinker not too bright at romance. She was invested as a member of the Order of Canada in 2017. Brand is the recipient of six honorary doctorates and was poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart (Penguin Random House Canada) from 2017-2021. Theory begins as its narrator sets out, like many a graduate student, to write a wildly ambitious thesis on the past, present, and future of art, culture, race, gender, class, and politicsa revolutionary work that its author believes will synthesize and thereby transform the world. Funny, wild, and completely lacking in pretension, Theory takes huge formal risks, reimagining the novel of ideas for our own moment, challenging and enchanting the reader at the same time. The narrator, comically and perhaps inevitably, fails at such revolutionary goals, distracted by a series of lovers and undone by her own inconsistencies. “My aim at the time,” she says, “was to write the bomb of a thesis that would blow up the buildings,” her research exploding the insistently white, straight, and male institutions of academia. The book centers on a narrator named Teoria who is trying to complete a doctoral dissertation of vaunting ambition. Theory (2018), her most recent novel, exhibits the formal complexity and daring of all of her work the novel feels no need to declare race and gender and instead situates the narrator fully in her intellectual and social worlds.

Aesthetically and politically radical, Brand’s work has made her a central figure in both world and Canadian literature, earning her many awards and honors, including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry (1997), the Griffin Poetry Prize (2011), the Toronto Book Award (2006, 2019), the Trillium Book Award (1997, 2019), and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Fiction (2019). Keywords: trauma theory / Dionne Brand / race / diaspora.

The third Poet Laureate of Toronto (2009-2012), Brand was born in Guayaguayare, Trinidad and moved to Toronto in 1970. Gale Academic OneFile includes Readers would seek grief: Dionne brands thirsty a by Tesla. Dionne Brand is a novelist, poet, and essayist.

Theory dionne brand