Monica Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and grew up in England. She is one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists of the decade, Newcomer of the Year at the 2004 British Book Awards and has been nominated for most of the major literary prizes in Britain. Brick Lane, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the George Orwell Prize for political writing and the prestigious Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Brick Lane was adapted for the screen, and released as an award-winning film in 2007. Her second novel, Alentejo Blue, set in Portugal, was published in 2006. Monica Ali lives in London with her husband and two children. Her new novel, In the Kitchen, will be published May 2009. Her visit is supported by Transworld Publishers.
Read a profile on Monica Ali and her book Brick Lane from The Observer
Books
Brick Lane
Nazneen’s inauspicious entry to the world, an apparent stillbirth on the hard mud floor of a Bangladeshi village hut, imbues in her a sense of fatalism that she carries across continents when she is married off to Chanu. Her life in London’s Tower Hamlets is, on the surface, calm. For years, keeping house and rearing children, she does what is expected of her. Yet Nazneen walks a tightrope stretched between her daughters’ embarrassment and her husband’s resentments. Chanu calls his elder daughter the little memsahib. ‘I didn’t ask to be born here,’ say Shahana, with regular finality. Into that fragile peace walks Karim. He sets questions before her, of longing and belonging; he sparks in her a turmoil that reflects the community’s own; he opens her eyes and directs her gaze – but what she sees, in the end, comes as a suprise to them both. While Nazneen journeys along her path of self-realization, a way haunted by her mother’s ghost, her sister Hasina, back in Bangladesh, rushes headlong at her life, first making a ‘love marriage’, then fleeing her violent husband. Woven through the novel, Hasina’s letters from Dhaka recount a world of overwhelming adversity. Shaped – yet ultimately not bound – by their landscapes and memories, both sisters struggle to dream themselves out of the rules prescribed for them. Beautifully rendered and, by turns, both comic and deeply moving, Brick Lane establishes Monica Ali as one of the most exciting new voices in fiction.
Alentejo Blue
Alentejo Blue is the story of the Portuguese village of Mamarrosa told through the lives of those who live there and those who are passing through – men and women, children and old people, locals, tourists and expatriates. For some, such as Teresa, a beautiful, dreamy village girl, it is a place from which to escape; for others – the dysfunctional Potts family – it is a way of running from trouble (but not eluding it). Vasco, a café owner who has never recovered from the death of his American wife, clings to a notion that his years in America make him superior to the other villagers. One English tourist makes Mamarrosa the subject of her fantasy of a new life, while for her compatriots, a young engaged couple, Mamarrosa is where their dreams finally fall apart. At the book’s opening an old man reflects on his long and troubled life in this beautiful and seemingly tranquil setting, and anticipates the return of Marco Afonso Rodrigues, the prodigal son of the village and a symbol of this now fast-changing world. The homecoming is the subject of continuing speculation, and when Marco Afonso Rodrigues does finally appear, villagers, tourists and expatriates are brought together and jealousies, passions and disappointments must inevitably collide.
In the Kitchen
'Who ends up in the kitchen, Gabe?' 'Misfits', he said, 'psychos, exiles, culinary artists, and people who just need a job'. In The Kitchen is Monica Ali's stunning follow up to Brick Lane. It opens with a mysterious death in the cellars of a smart, cosmopolitan hotel and over the course of the ensuing pages, peels back the layers of polyglot London to reveal the melting pot which exists below. Once again it confirms Monica Ali not only as a great modern storyteller but also an acute observer of the vagaries of a contemporary culture. In the Kitchen will be published in May 2009.