H. Nigel Thomas emigrated from St. Vincent and the Grenadines in 1968. He now lives in the Greenfield Park suburb of Montreal. He is a graduate of Concordia University, McGill University, and Universite de Montreal. Until 2006 he was professor of US literature at Universite Laval. His short stories, poems, and articles have appeared in several journals and anthologies. He is the author of thirteen books: six novels: Spirits in the Dark (1993), Behind the Face of Winter (2001), Return to Arcadia (2007), No Safeguards (2015), Fate's Instruments (2018), Easily Fooled (2021); three collections of short stories: How Loud Can the Village Cock Crow (2005), Lives: Whole and Otherwise (2010), When the Bottom Falls Out and Other stories (2014); two collections of poems: Moving through Darkness (1999), The Voyage (2021); and two academic books: From Folklore to Fiction: A Study of Folk Heroes and Rituals in the Black American Novel (1988) and Why We Write: Conversations with African Canadian Poets and Novelists (2006). Lives: Whole and Otherwise is available in French with the title Des vies cassées, and Behind the Face of Winter with the title De glace et d'ombre.
He holds the following awards: 2000 Jackie Robinson Professional of the Year Award; 2013 Université Laval Homage aux Créateurs; 2020 Martin Luther King Junior Achievement Award, 2021 Quebec Writers' Association Judy Mappin Community Award; 2022 Canada Council for the Arts John Molson Prize for the Arts. He was shortlisted for the QSPELL 1994 Hugh MacLennan Fiction Prize; in 2015 for the Paragraphe Quebec Writers' Federation Hugh MacLennan Fiction Prize, in 2015 for Le prix Carbet des lycéens.
See his website www.hnigelthomas.org for full details of his publications, etc.
Workshops and readings