TORONTO, Nov 2: Celebrated Canadian author Rohinton Mistry has cancelled the second half of a US book tour, complaining of “unbearable” humiliation as a result of racial profiling, the Globe and Mail reported on Saturday.

“He (Mistry) has been extremely unhappy about the way he has been treated in airports around the US in the first half of his tour,” the Globe reported a representative of Mistry’s US publisher, Alfred. A Knopf, as saying in a memo sent to affected bookstores.

Mistry, who was born in India, has had three works short-listed for the Booker Prize, including “Family Matters” this year. He and his representatives were unable to be reached for comment.

Canada’s government last week urged Canadian citizens born in Middle Eastern and Muslim countries to think carefully before entering the United States, after Washington said anyone born in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Yemen would be subject to extra scrutiny.

Mistry is not Muslim and was not born in one of the affected countries, but said that he had been treated badly during the first half of his US book tour.

“As a person of colour he was stopped repeatedly and rudely at each airport along the way — to the point where the humiliation for both he and his wife has become unbearable,” the newspaper quoted the memo as saying.

At last month’s Booker Prize dinner in Britain, Mistry told his New York based publisher, Sonny Mehta, that he was very unhappy with the treatment he’d received in the United States.

“He just said that he had a terrible time travelling in the US He was really very upset,” Mehta told the Globe.—Reuters