Activity: Reading
Host: Moray House Trust
Date: Monday 27 January 2014
Pauline Melville was born in Guyana, of a Guyanese father and English mother. Her family migrated to England in the early 1950s and she is based in the UK. Her first published work, Shape-shifter, a collection of short stories, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1991. Salman Rushdie, a one-time neighbour of Melville’s, described the collection as “part Caribbean magic, part London grime, written in a slippery, chameleon language that is a frequent delight.” and another writer admired her “wonderful ear for living voices.”
In 1997, her first novel, The Ventriloquist’s Tale, set in nineteenth century British Guiana, won the Whitbread First Novel Award. A year later, she published The Migration of Ghosts, a second collection of stories. Hauntings, migrations and mutability are recurring themes in her work. The writer read extracts from her work and discussed them.