Kelly Watt is a writer and activist. She has lived and studied in Canada, the United States, France and India. Originally from Toronto, she has written for print, radio, film and television for over two decades.

Watt began her career in non-fiction, writing on health for women’s magazines and medical journals and moonlighting as a researcher for television. She traveled across Canada as the writer and co-ordinator for CBC’s Front Page Challenge. Her award-winning short fiction has been published in several literary magazines, including the anthologies She Writes and Best of Canadian Short Stories by Oberon Press, 2004. She won first prize in Dandelion Magazine’s national short story competition in 1991. Her first novel, Mad Dog was published in 2001 by Doubleday Canada. The film rights were optioned one year later by Symerra Productions, a Canadian company based in Los Angeles. She is presently at work on a second book.

As a human rights activist, Watt has frequently travelled with Persons Against Ritual Abuse-Torture as a volunteer, educating the public about ritualized pedophilia, child trafficking and non-state actor torture. She’s presented at conferences in the U.S. and Canada; at the University of Toronto Symposium on Human Trafficking: Women’s Voices, Women’s Rights: Violence and the Global Sex Trade; and at the 51st Commission on the Status of Women, at the United Nations in New York in 2007. She recently presented on a panel about the Sexualization of Torture, at the University of Quebec in Montreal, in commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, December 2009.