Jaspreet Singh was born in Punjab. He grew up in Jammu and Kashmir, and in several cities in India. He received his Bachelor of Chemical Engineering from Panjab University, Chandigarh. Singh relocated to Montreal at the age of twenty to attend McGill University, where he completed a M.Eng. and a Ph.D. He worked as a research scientist for three years, and began to write fiction during this time, eventually publishing the acclaimed short-story collection Seventeen Tomatoes, which won the 2004 McAuslan First Book Prize and has been translated into Spanish and Punjabi. His work has been featured on CBC Radio, and has appeared in The Walrus and Zoetrope. He has held roles as writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary and the University of the Fraser Valley. He currently splits his time between the Indian Himalayas and the Canadian Rockies.

Chef, Singh’s first novel, won Alberta’s Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for four awards: the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Canada and the Caribbean Region), the Quebec Hugh MacLennan Prize, the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award and the W.O. Mitchell Book Prize. Chef is also longlisted for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.