[1] Her MA focused on post-colonial literature and explored subject matter like how outsiders are perceived within society and how there are conflicting ideas regarding belonging.
[5][6] Her other novels include This Body (HarperCollins, 2004, and Macmillan Caribbean, 2005), Step Closer (HarperCollins 2009), Vital Signs (Random House Canada 2011 and William Heinemann, 2012), which was nominated for the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Higher Ed (Random House Canada and Scribe UK, 2015)[7] and The Snow Line (Random House Canada and Scribe UK, 2021), nominated for the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize.
McWatt provided the libretto for Hannah Kendall's opera The Knife of Dawn, based on the incarceration of political activist Martin Carter in the then British Guiana in 1953.
[8][9] She is the co-editor, along with Dionne Brand and Rabindranath Maharaj, of Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada (Cormorant Books, 2018).
[10] She was one of the winners of the Eccles British Library Award 2018[11] for her critical memoir Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, which was also shortlisted for the 2020 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction,[12] the 2020 Canadian Governor General's Literary Awards for Non-Fiction, and it was the Non-Fiction Winner of the 2020 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.