H. S. Bhabra

Hargurchet Singh Bhabra (7 June 1955 – 1 June 2000) was a British Asian writer and broadcaster who settled in Canada.

Bhabra was born in Mumbai, India, and moved to England with his family in 1957. The family eventually settled in Beare Green, Surrey. From 1966 to 1973, Bhabra attended Reigate Grammar School. He was the only boy of Asian origin in the school, was highly regarded by his teachers, and an accomplished actor in school productions such as Much Ado about Nothing. Regarded by his teachers as the most exceptional member of an exceptional year, he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, where he read English Literature.

Publication Bhabra worked for six years in financial advertising in the City of London. In 1984, he resigned to complete Gestures, a novel on which he had been working for years. He travelled and worked as a correspondent for a few years, which provided material for his career as a writer of fiction, under his own name and also as A M Kabal and John Ford. Gestures won a Betty Trask Award in 1987. It has been described thus: "With extraordinary force and subtlety, Gestures conducts the 'funeral rite over an entire way of life . . . a liberal, human, European culture which has finally disappeared'. The lines could stand as an epitaph for Bhabra himself. Infused with his own erudition, elegance and empathy, it was also—and to a great degree—an expression of his own sense of displacement." While there, he also developed an obsession with climbing bridges, which led to his arrest while making an assault on the Golden Gate, San Francisco. Bhabra also taught at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

Canada In 1994, Bhabra moved to Toronto, where his parents now lived. In Canada, Bhabra was perceived as an Asian-Canadian writer and broadcaster. He taught at the Humber School for Writers at Humber College and then joined public broadcaster TVOntario as co-host, with Marni Jackson, of the book show Imprint from 1995 to 1997. In 2003, the Luminous Veil was finally completed and in the same year Gestures was reprinted.

In December 2014, Maclean's published Marni Jackson's description of being sexually harassed by Bhabra.