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Six meters of Pavement is about this guy named Ismail Boxwala who is a middle-age, South
Asian man who makes the worse mistake of his life about twenty years ago. It’s a story
about his survival and his redemption and it's also a love story. Six meters of pavement
refers to the distance between two neighbours in the book. They live six meters of pavement
apart and they fall in love.
So the tragedy that Ismail has experienced, the big mistake he has experienced, is that
he forgot his baby daughter in the back seat of his car on a summer day and she died. So
I heard about these kinds of stories in the media in the past. One of the things that
I really thought a lot about was how do you get over the worse mistake of your life? So
I wanted to write a story about that. So Six meters of Pavement takes place, most of it,
in Little Portugal in Toronto. It’s the first neighbourhood in Toronto, even though
I lived here for a long time, where I really had a sense of community and neighbourliness.
I know many of my neighbours and I really appreciate this neighbourhood and so it inspired
the novel in lots of ways.
I do see myself as a Toronto writer but I also see myself as a Canadian writer, as a
South Asian writer, as a *** writer. I think that this book is a book about falling in
love. So I think for most people what they take away from it is a love story. It's also
book about chosen family, about how three different people from three different communities
with three different problems can come together to support each other.
The Toronto Book Awards are really important to me because this book was really inspired
by Toronto and this particular neighbourhood, and so it means a lot to me that my book got
chosen as a good or important novel. In general though, awards are very important to writers
because it can be really hard to promote your book. There are so many good books out there
and to have your book named just helps with promotion, which is really important and I
really appreciate it.