Téa Mutonji
Téa Mutonji is a Canadian writer, whose debut short story collection Shut Up You're Pretty was published in 2019.
Born in the Republic of the Congo, Mutonji came to Canada with her family in childhood and grew up in the Scarborough district of Toronto and in Oshawa. She studied media studies and creative writing at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and planned to go to law school when she was selected as the first writer to be published by VS, Vivek Shraya's new publishing imprint for emerging writers of colour.
Shut Up You're Pretty, a collection of linked short stories about a young girl's coming of age in Scarborough's Galloway neighbourhood, was written in part to counter negative stereotypes of the neighbourhood with a narrative that depicted some of her own more positive experiences of having lived there. The book was published in spring 2019, and was named a shortlisted finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in September. In 2020, the book won the Edmund White Award for debut fiction from Publishing Triangle.
