Lecturer launches first novel at the Royal Festival Hall
The London Literature Festival is currently celebrating the power of words to change the world, and a debut novel by a University of Sussex lecturer was launched at the Royal Festival Hall as part of those celebrations on Wednesday evening (8 October).
Dr Minoli Salgado
In 2012 Dr Minoli Salgado’s novel – A Little Dust on the Eyes – won the inaugural SI Leeds Literary Prize for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian women writers. This was run as part of the Ilkley Literature Festival and led to an offer of publication by independent publishers Peepal Tree Press.
At Wednesday’s launch the author and literary critic Bernardine Evaristo introduced the novel.
Published on Monday (6 October), it relates the tale of two cousins separated by civil war who are reunited by a family wedding before the Asian tsunami of 2004.
Dr Salgado was born in Kuala Lumpur and grew up in Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia and England. She said: “My books are set in Sri Lanka, my ancestral home, and I guess the thread that links them is my interest in silenced stories.
“The SI Leeds competition came at a perfect time and offered that rare opportunity of an outlet for these narratives. I knew my book would be read by people who care about issues that really matter to me.”
In connection with the book’s release, Dr Salgado is preparing for readings and discussion at the Ilkley Literature Festival on 18 October; an event celebrating 30 years of the journal, Wasafiri, at Goldsmith’s on 22 October; and another headlined by Ben Okri at the Writers’ Centre Norwich in November.
Dr Salgado, a Senior Lecturer in English, teaches postcolonial literature at Sussex and has had short fiction published in various journals and anthologies.
Her monograph, Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the politics of place (published by Routledge in 2007), situated Sri Lankan literature in English within the context of cultural nationalism and the civil war.