Irene Marques

Irene Marques holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, a Masters in French Literature, a Masters in Comparative Literature and a Bachelor of Social Work. She is a bilingual writer (English and Portuguese) and has taught African and Caribbean literatures, comparative and world literature, literary theory, and writing and rhetoric at the Ontario College of Art and Design University for the last seven years. In the past she was a lecturer in Portuguese and a TA at University of Toronto and also worked at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health for the last 14 years. Her academic publications include the edited volume The Works of Chin Ce: A Critical Overview (2007), the manuscript Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity (2012) and numerous articles in international journals including African Identities: Journal of Economics, Culture and Society, Research in African Literatures, and CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. Her published works of fiction include Wearing Glasses of Water (poetry, 2007), Habitando na Metáfora do Tempo: Crónicas Desejadas (short stories, 2009) and The Circular Incantation (prose poetry, 2013). In 2019, she won the Prémio Imprensa Nacional/Ferreira de Castro (National Press Award) in Portugal for her novel Uma Casa no Mundo (A House in the World), to be published in 2020 by Imprensa Nacional.