Harinder Kaur Dhahan immigrated to Canada in 1969 shortly after completing Bachelor’s of Arts and Bachelor’s of Education degrees. Settling in South Vancouver, Dhahan spent two years at Langara and secured a job in finance, a field she would work in for the next thirty years. While balancing her family life, raising two daughters, and working, Dhahan found time to volunteer for the Khalsa Diwan Society, starting in 1975. It is through volunteering that she began to teach Punjabi. Starting as a volunteer Punjabi teacher, Dhahan would later begin teaching Punjabi at Khalsa School in 1992. After retirement she hoped to teach full time, an aspiration that she fulfilled in 2005. Dhahan’s love for the Punjabi language manifests in her teaching, and is also manifest in an annual literary award her brother and herself founded, the Dhahan Prize, an international prize for short stories and novels written in either Gurmukhi or Shahmukhi. Dhahan tells us that that her purpose, and the purpose of the Dhahan prize, is to connect people to their language.