Zalika Reid-Benta

Zalika Reid-Benta is a Canadian author born in Toronto, where she continues to live and set much of her fiction. She holds a BA in English, cinema studies, and Caribbean studies from the University of Toronto and an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Her debut, Frying Plantain (2019), is a collection of linked short stories following Kara Davis through adolescence in Toronto's Little Jamaica neighborhood, drawing on Reid-Benta's Jamaican-Canadian heritage; it won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. She followed it with River Mumma (2023), a novel blending Jamaican folklore with a young woman's quarter-life crisis in contemporary Toronto, which was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award and received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.