ਸ਼ੌਨਾ ਸਿੰਘ ਬਾਲਡਵਿਨਸ਼ੌਨਾ ਸਿੰਘ ਬਾਲਡਵਿਨ

Early life and education

Shauna Singh Baldwin was born in 1962 in Montreal, Canada, into a Punjabi family, and she grew up in India. She has said that she wanted to be a writer from the age of eleven. Her life since has been lived across three countries, Canada, India and the United States, and her fiction returns to all three.

Her education crossed the same map. She took a commerce degree at Delhi University, an MBA at Marquette University in Milwaukee and an MFA at the University of British Columbia. Before fiction paid her way she worked in the practical world her studies prepared her for, as an IT consultant and website designer, and as an independent radio producer.

From the radio studio to a first book

From 1991 to 1994 Baldwin produced and hosted Sunno!, an East Indian American radio show whose promise was that you did not have to be East Indian to listen. When a few of her short stories were broadcast on the show, listeners asked for more, and those stories grew into her first book, English Lessons and Other Stories, published in 1996. Its stories follow Indian women between India and North America, from the closed circle of the family to the office and the university.

The collection won the Friends of American Writers Prize in 1996, and its story Jassie won the Writer's Union of Canada short fiction prize. A second collection of cross-cultural stories, We Are Not in Pakistan, followed in 2007.

The novels

Her first novel, What the Body Remembers, appeared in 1999. Based on her family history and set in British-ruled India in the ten years before Partition, it tells of Satya and Roop, the two wives of a wealthy Sikh landowner, as their household is pulled toward 1947. The novel won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book in the Canada and Caribbean region, was longlisted for the Orange Prize, and has been translated into fifteen languages. A twentieth anniversary edition was published by Tara Press in 2020.

The Tiger Claw (2004), her second novel, changed continents: inspired by Noor Inayat Khan, the Second World War resistance radio operator, it was nominated for Canada's Giller Prize and has been optioned for film. Her third novel, The Selector of Souls (2012), set in India, received the Council for Wisconsin Writers Fiction Prize. She has also published a volume of essays and speeches, Reluctant Rebellions (2016), and the play We Are So Different Now, which premiered in Canada in 2016.

Honours and later life

Baldwin has served as a juror for Canada's Governor General's Prize in 2008 and for the Giller Prize in 2014, and in 2018 she received the South Asian Literature Association Distinguished Writer Prize. She lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with her husband David. The two were former owners of the Safe House, Milwaukee's espionage-themed restaurant, the same restaurant where she first heard the story of Noor Inayat Khan that became The Tiger Claw.

Her name carries her history in it. In an interview she explained that she lost her family name when she married out of her community and chose to keep Singh: not Kaur, she said, because she was no princess and was not being treated as one. She took Singh, in her words, to feel more like a lion, a daily reminder to be courageous not only for herself but for others.

Why does Baldwin matter to Punjabi readers?

Reviewers noticed from the start that What the Body Remembers did something Partition fiction had rarely done: it centred a Sikh household, and told the division of India through two women rather than through the confrontation of Hindus and Muslims. Baldwin herself has said she thinks in English, in Urdu, in Punjabi and in French, and that in-between position is her subject: women adjusting, resisting and remembering across the countries that made them. For the Punjabi diaspora, she is one of the first novelists in English to carry Punjab's own story, its villages, its faith and its women, to bestseller lists and prize juries on three continents.

Across her books the same questions return. How is power used inside a family, and what does a woman's refusal cost her? Baldwin has argued that economics sits under most choices her characters make: follow the money, she says, and the reason a woman stays, leaves, obeys or rebels usually becomes clear. It is the lens she brings alike to a Punjab village in 1937, to an immigrant kitchen in North America, and to a prison cell in wartime Germany.