Larissa Lai
Professor and Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies, Canadian Studies Program, University College and Department of English
Larissa Lai is a professor and the Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies in the Canadian Studies Program at University College and the Department of English. She is the author of nine books including Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s, The Tiger Flu, Salt Fish Girl, Iron Goddess of Mercy and most recently The Lost Century.
Lai is a recipient of the Jim Duggins Novelist's Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Astraea Award, and the Otherwise Honor Book award and was twice a finalist for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Award. She has also been a finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Sunburst Award, the bpNichol Chapbook Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize, the ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism and the Governor General's Award.
Lai received her BA(Hon.) from the University of British Columbia, her MA from the University of East Anglia, and her PhD from the University of Calgary. She was an associate professor in Canadian literature at the University of British Columbia before moving to the University of Calgary to take up a Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing in 2007. In 2022-23, Lai held a Maria Zambrano Fellowship at the University of Huelva in Spain.