Member of the Order of Canada

• Awarded on: October 29, 2004
• Invested on: June 10, 2005

Since making a dramatic career change in the late 1980s, M G Vassanji has become a leading light in Canadian literature. A nuclear physicist who was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania, he came to Canada in 1978 and began writing full-time in 1989, after the publication of his first novel, the award-winning The Gunny Sack. He hasn't looked back. He is the first person to have won the Giller Prize twice, for The Book of Secrets and The In-Between Life of Vikram Lall. As well, he promotes other writers, particularly those of different cultures, as founding editor of a small publishing company and a literary review.