Lido Pimienta, a Colombia native who attended Beal high school in London, has won the $50,000 Polaris Music Prize for her album La Papessa. Performed in Spanish, it flew under the critical radar before winning arguably the biggest music award in Canada Monday night.

But Pimienta’s talent first started drawing attention in London more than a decade ago. Here are some facts about the woman who may be London’s first-ever Polaris prize winner:

-- The Colombia native arrived in London in 2006, at age 19, and attended the prestigious art program at Beal secondary school. She attended the Ontario College of Art and Design but in 2010 told The Free Press she was bound for Western University.

-- Her name first appears in Free Press archives in 2006, when she was listed among the performers in a show at The Arts Project that gave talented emigrants a chance to show off their work.

-- In March 2010, her musical skills were first reviewed – tellingly – in The Free Press: “She performed Feb. 20 (at the Forest City Gallery) to a stunned crowd. Never before have I seen so many young, cool, beautiful people, dancing their asses off! A great night. This girl will be huge," our reviewer wrote. That year, our James Reaney named her EPColor the third-best record in the city. It was produced by London musician Michael Ramey, her then-husband

-- Two years ago, she DJ’d at Museum London during London’s 2015 Nuit Blanche event. “I go by GlitClit, and the music I play in my sessions is a mix between ethereal sounds and Afro Latin Diaspora and some singing,” she said at the time. “It is playful and experimental.”

-- She performed at a pair of 2016 events here, the Dundas Street Festival and the Grickle Grass Festival at the children's museum.

-- To win the 2017 Polaris Music Prize on Monday night, she beat out a field of competitors that included Feist, Leonard Cohen and Gord Downie of The Tragically Hip.

-- She didn’t hold back in her acceptance speech: “Perhaps the only thing I can say is I hope that the Aryan specimen who told me to go back to my own country two weeks after I arrived in London, Ontario, Canada is watching this,” she said.