A Little Dust on the Eyes
She has got used to the sound of sea and wind in the house, has carved herself a shelter in the fall of a dying wave. The last time she had breathed in time to this rhythm she had been fifteen years old. She had lain on the bed and breathed in the water, taking it deep into her body so her chest had felt full, just as her father’s must have been. She had felt the pressure carry to her ears and the extremities of her skull, the world sealing over, carrying her into the darkness with him. She now curls into the swell, allowing it to carry her into the space he left behind.
With Margaret Busby and Bonnie Greer.
A Little Dust on the Eyes won the inaugural SI Leeds Literary Prize for unpublished fiction in 2012 and was published by Peepal Tree Press in October 2014.
The London Launch was held at the Southbank Centre as part of the London Literature Festival.
Book launch: 8 October 2014
Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre
Prize Advocate Irenosen Okojie, 2012 Prizewinner Minoli Salgado and Prize Ambassador Margaret Busby with a copy of Minoli’s debut novel ‘A Little Dust on the Eyes’ (Photo courtesy of Emma D’Costa)
Emma D’Costa of the Commonwealth Foundation has written an overview of the launch event here.
Interviews published soon after winning the prize can be found here and here.
DSC Prize Longlist
A Little Dust on the Eyes was longlisted for the 2016 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. The longlist comprised 11 books that the jury felt represent the best works of fiction related to the South Asian region published in the last year.
You will find further coverage here:
A Sunday Times Sri Lanka interview can be found here.
Translation
A Little Dust on the Eyes was one of only two books in English (the other being Ben Okri’s The Famished Road) chosen for translation into Slovene by the EU funded project Echoes of Realities.
Echoes of Realities is a multicultural project that aims to juxtapose literary reflections of marginalised social identities. The title of the project stresses the connection between social (reality) and personal representation (echo). Books were selected on the basis of the author’s capability to address the connections between old and new worlds in ‘outstanding literary language’; ‘All authors deal with mechanisms of memory/remembrance, some with strategies of social oblivion/personal amnesia; [and] all are able to manifest and articulate today’s risky identity shifts’.
Translated by Ana Jasmina Oseban it was published by Polica Dubova in 2017. It can be purchased HERE.
A slew of events took place in Slovenia to mark the publication of the translation. A summary can be found HERE.
In 2024, a chapter from the novel was translated into Arabic by the painter and scholar Dr Farah Alrajeh and published in FIKR magazine. This can be found HERE.
