click a category

"TSAR is changing our understanding of the Canadian literary landscape through its innovative publications."

— Canadian Literature

TSAR Publications is dedicated to bringing to the reading public fresh new writing from Canada and across the world that reflects the diversity of our rapidly globalizing world, particularly in Canada and the United States. Our focus is on works that can loosely be termed "multicultural" and particularly those that pertain to Asia and Africa.

We publish 6-8 titles of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction (literary criticism, history) per year.

Queries for submission may be sent by email. Unsolicited email manuscripts will not be considered.

In 1981, a group of young people, who had been in North America for just over a decade, decided to take the plunge and start the magazine they had always dreamed about as students at a time in which Naipaul had to be ordered from bookstores, let alone Narayan or Ngugi or Soyinka. The result was The Toronto South Asian Review, which later became the much broader-based The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad and helped entrench a generation of new writers. As an offshoot of this literary magazine, in 1985  TSAR Publications published its first title, a book of essays on South Asian Canadian literature, followed by a book of poetry by Sri Lankan Canadian Rienzi Crusz.

Among our achievements: we have played a role in the formulation of the Indo-Caribbean identity through the publication of several ground-breaking titles; we have kept in print books by major Caribbean writers Sam Selvon, Ismith Khan, and John Stewart; we have published provocative and  perceptive social and literary critical works by Arnold Itwaru, Arun Prabha Mukherjee, and Himani Bannerji; the introduction of the important Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera; the first historical and critical study of Chinese Canadian writing in English; the first anthologies of South Asian Canadian literature and South Asian Canadian women's poetry and South Asian Canadian and American women's fiction.