Alum Anuja Varghese highlighted in McGill News article

Anuja Varghese (BA’05) is an award-winning author whose first book, Chrysalis, has been awarded the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers from the Writers’ Trust of Canada and the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. Varghese was recently profiled by McGill News, where she spoke about her experience studying literature and its wide-ranging impact on both her writing and professional career.

“For her undergraduate studies, she chose English literature at McGill. “When I first went to visit and walked around the campus, I started to feel like that I belong here. Something about Montreal spoke to me,” she says.

She was enthralled by the books her professors exposed her to. “I got this wide-ranging survey of literature which I had never really looked into,” she says. “What I was reading growing up was mainly popular fiction. I had never really looked into the classics and had never been [immersed in] them until I went to McGill.”

Varghese’s McGill studies also helped pave the way for her subsequent career in arts administration and grant-writing. She had a Work Study position in the Department of English as an administrative assistant. She helped set up meetings and events, worked at Moyse Hall’s box office, and proofread theatrical programs – and realized that there was a lot going on behind the scenes at arts and cultural organizations.

“There [were careers] in arts administration, a field I didn’t even know existed as something concrete, and that gave me the chance to use my writing skills to take me towards that kind of practical career.”

Once she graduated, she moved to Toronto and began to secure positions in arts organizations working in administration, fundraising, and grant-writing.”