About

‘I was born in a house screened by golden bamboo that touched the sky, the spirits of light and wind and rain playing on a flute of bamboo reeds.’

from ‘Heart’

Or to cut a long story short:

Minoli Salgado was born in Kuala Lumpur and grew up in Sri Lanka, South East Asia and England. She was educated at schools in Penang Hill, Colombo (briefly) and North Devon before going on to study English Literature at the universities of Sussex, Manchester and Warwick. After gaining her PhD in Indo-Anglian fiction, she returned to the University of Sussex where she taught postcolonial literature for many years as Tutorial Fellow, Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader and Professor of English. She is Professor of International Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and founding Director of the Centre for Migration and Postcolonial Studies (MAPS).

She has recently read:

Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers

Otto Dov Kulka, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death

Rosie Jackson, Love Leans over the Table

Ramya Chamalie Jirasinghe, There’s an Island in the Bone

Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

Tan Twan Eng, The House of Doors

 

Interviews

Minoli de Soysa, “Twelve Cries from Home: Searing Accounts from Families of the Disappeared“, Groundviews, 1 February 2022. Available here.

Birte Heidemann, ‘“When the making of history was the making of silence”: An Interview with Minoli Salgado’, Postcolonial Text, Vol. 11, No 4 (2016). Available here.

Adilah Ismail, ‘How true tales become truth tales’, The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka, 21 June 2020. Available here  and here.

Shamira A. Meghani and Anthony Carrigan, Interview: ‘Reframing Disaster: Creativity and Activism’, Special issue: ‘Postcolonial Environments: Animals, Ecologies, Localities’, ed. by Veronica Barnsley, Jade Munslow Ong and Matthew Whittle, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 51.2,  (2016),  256-274. Available here.

Liam O’Loughlin, ‘“A Different Way of Seeing”: An Interview with Minoli Salgado’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 47.4 (2016),  163-173. Available here.

Azad Ashim Sharma, ‘”When Words Become Dangerous”: In Conversation with Minoli Salgado‘,Wasafiri, 99 (Autumn 2019), 20-25. Available here.

Repeater Books, ‘The View from Sri Lanka: An Interview with Minoli Salgado‘, 11 May 2022. Available here.

 

Public Talks