Kuldip Gill

Kuldip Gill was born in Punjab, India; she and her family immigrated to Canada when Kuldip was five years old. The family formally settled in the Fraser Valley area of British Columbia. After working for several years in the resource industry, she pursued and obtained both a BA and MA in Social Anthropology from UBC, the latter in 1982. In 1988, she received a Ph.D. – also from UBC – after extensive travel to Fiji to research the lives of elderly Indian women there.

For several years her writing, research and teaching tended to be anthropology-based, but in 1997 she began exploring poetry as an expressive medium. She studied creative writing at Langara College, the Banff School of Fine Arts, and with the Booming Ground Writer’s Community at UBC. She has published two books and is featured in several other anthologies and journals. Her first book publication, Dharma Rasa (Nightwood Editions, 1999) was the winner of the B.C. 2000 Book Award offered by the Government of British Columbia.

She has taught at UBC, Simon Fraser University, and Open Learning Canada in Burnaby. In 2005, she earned an MFA in Theatre, Music and Creative Writing from UBC. That same year, she was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters (D.Litt, 2005) from the University College of the Fraser Valley (UCFV). In 2006, she became Writer-in-Residence at UCFV. She is currently a faculty member at UCFV in the Department of English and a volunteer with its Centre for Indo-Canadian Studies. Kuldip resided in Mission and died after a brief illness on May 10, 2009.