Selected as a Best Book of 2025 by The Times, The Critic, News24 and NPR.

Photo credit: Tricia Keracher-Summerfield

About Me

I grew up in Trinidad, the youngest of four children.

My father was Indo-Trinidadian (like Naipaul), my mother Irish. They were both medical doctors, although my mother stopped practicing when we were kids.

Every three years, we spent the summer in Ireland, visiting my mother’s family in Loughine, Co. Cork.

Mirroring the story of Golden Child, each of my siblings and I left Trinidad at the age of 18, on academic scholarships to universities in North America.

I left Trinidad for Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where I majored in Physics. (I’m Class of 1996.) I really did like Physics! But I also liked many other subjects.

After Brown, I moved to Europe, and lived between Italy and Ireland for a few years before settling in the UK.

In the UK, I took an MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2011, where I started work on Golden Child.

My parents carried on living in Trinidad until they were in their 80s (and I was in my 40s), and during that time, I went back frequently to visit. These days, I visit less often - every couple of years. Most of my father’s extended family still live in Trinidad.

Nowadays, I live in south London with my husband and two children. I work as a tutor and mentor through the Goldsmiths MA in Creative Writing in London, and Faber Academy. I occasionally review fiction for the Guardian and the Irish Times.

I’m working on all sorts of bits and pieces at the moment: stories, plays, screenplays… and a new novel is taking shape… I think… I hope.

Novels

Golden Child was published in 2019, by Faber (UK), SJP for Hogarth (USA/Canada), and in translation. It won multiple prizes and was selected as one of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels that Shaped our World’.

More about Golden Child.

Love Forms was published 2025, by Faber (UK) and Hogarth (USA/Canada), with translations forthcoming. It was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

More about Love Forms.

… We go quiet for years at a time!

Drop your email here if you’d like to stay in touch.

You know novelists…

Read more in this interview in Caribbean Beat magazine.

Read more in this interview in the Irish Times.

Here more in this video of a talk I gave at a Library Journal conference in New York, introduced by Sarah Jessica Parker.

So where’s home? Read my essay here. (Everyone likes this essay.)

Read a recent Guardian review here.