Jasmine Sealy

Jasmine Sealy is a British-born, Barbadian-Canadian writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her debut novel, The Island of Forgetting, won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award in 2023.

Life Sealy was born in the UK and grew up in Barbados. She moved to Canada at age eighteen to study international development and has lived there ever since. In 2020, the short story she wrote as her master's thesis, "A Fair Wind to Take You Home", was the winner of the UBC/HarperCollins Best New Fiction Prize.

Sealey's first novel, The Island of Forgetting, was based on that short story. In 2023, the novel won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and "Hot Pot" was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. In 2021, her story "Collapse", first published in Room, was included in Best Canadian Stories 2021. In 2023, she was named one of the ten winners of the Journey Prize, in a special edition devoted to new Black Canadian writers. Her story "Collapse" appeared again in the prize anthology, The Journey Prize Stories 33, together with "Caves", first published in Prairie Fire.

Sealy has been prose editor at Prism International, taught creative writing at Capilano University, and been Writer in Residence at the University of British Columbia School of Creative Writing and Langara College.

Awards

Year Work Award Category Result Ref 2023 The Island of Forgetting Amazon Canada First Novel Award — OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature Fiction