Sophie Jai’s cultural highlights

Sophie Jai is a Trinidadian-Canadian novelist. Her debut novel Wild Fires (HarperCollins) has won and been shortlisted for several awards, including the 2023 Canadian Authors Association Fred Kerner Book Award, the 2023 Toronto Book Awards, the 2023 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and the UK’s 2019 Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award. She has been a Writer-in-Residence, Scholar, and Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford, where she received her Master’s in Creative Writing in 2025.

Album: The Richest Man in Babylonby Thievery Corporation

The peace and ecstasy this staple trip hop album (and Thievery Corporation in general) has gifted me over the years is unmatched by any other band. The sirenesque voice of LouLou on tracks like ‘Omid’ (sung in Farsi) and ‘Un Simple Histoire’ (sung in French) has consistently lured me, for fifteen years, into trancelike, euphoric states. This album is thought to be a popular gateway to other trip hop artists, even if Pitchfork Magazine said in 2002 – the same year the album came out – that it was music ‘not meant to be listened to, but to be displayed as a marker of jaded sophistication.’ I feel just a little bit sorry for that writer to have all that music go into one ear only to come right out the other.

https://thieverycorporation.com/portfolio/the-richest-man-in-babylon/

Poetry: Shadow Price by Farah Ghafoor

I was a juror for the 2025 Toronto Book Awards, and this stunning collection of poetry made the longlist. Ghafoor spins corporate language against the natural world, where the fight against climate change (and really, the irrepressible need to be more connected to nature and less to the futile technological coldness of the future) feels too large, and therefore lost. The title of the book itself is brilliant: it calls attention to a ridiculous economic concept, but an inanely profitable one – ‘shadow price: the estimated price of a good or service for which no market price exists’.

https://www.farahghafoor.com/shadowprice.html

Writing Residency: Sangam House, India

This writing residency takes place in Bangalore, India. Me and three other women writers occupied a large house. In the mornings, we didn’t need to talk to anyone, but coffee and breakfast would be hot and waiting. Sometimes I would turn a corner and someone would be reading with her legs thrown to one side of a sofa; or she’d be in the garden writing, or downstairs in a slant of sunlight, doing either or. Our dinners were spectacular: we’d go over how our writing went for that day, bounce from topic to topic, and indulge in delicious, homemade Indian food and wine. I ate so much gulab jamun that I started looking like one. I often call that period The Time I Lived in A House Full of Women Writing, and look back on it fondly, as if it were a memory from a film I saw long ago.

https://www.sangamhouse.org/

Photo by Sophie Jai

Play: Take d Milk, Nah?

I saw this play at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto in 2018. The one-man show by playwright Jivesh Parasram explored hyphenated identities (all identical to mine – Trinidian-Canadian-Indian-West Indian) and the cost of belonging. Parasram was funny, enlightening, and there was never once a dull moment. The intimacy of a small theatre and close proximity to the audience most definitely influenced this. But there were heavy moments too, which I could feel in my chest, like when he asked, for a short period of time, that only those from minority groups stay in the audience, and ‘others’ leave. This had me literally grimacing in my seat. I wondered after: was it so Parasram could see how many of us would comply easily or outright resist? Or was it so the audience could experience discomfort firsthand, rather than it be relayed to them through performance?

https://www.playwrightscanada.com/Books/T/Take-d-Milk-Nah

https://www.cbc.ca/books/take-d-milk-nah-1.6210793

My Favourite WritersMosaic writer

Anthony Joseph. I adore his digital album The Frequency of Magic. I read, listened, and danced to this novel all at the same time. How many books can I say that about?

https://www.bocaslitfest.com/the-frequency-of-magic/