Sheena Kalayil – författare

It is 1989, and in a small Baltic city in East Germany, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, three young people from vastly different backgrounds become friends. Armando is a factory worker from Mozambique, Lolita is a medical student from India, and Theo is an East Berliner who dreams of being a writer.When Armando and Lolita make a grisly discovery, they find themselves caught up in the politics of Theo’s homeland more than ever before. While a quiet revolution sweeps through Eastern Europe, and the Berlin Wall teeters, the three find themselves entangled in a poignant love triangle which threatens their futures.As the world order shifts, their three lives are bound together in a web of love, lies and fears, leaving each irrevocably changed.

After more than thirty years in London, recently-widowed Thomas Imbalil returns to India. He spends his first months in uncluttered isolation in his house overlooking the Arabian Sea, in a small fishing village in Kerala.But when he agrees to look after his friend''s business, Chacko''s Optical Store, he meets and befriends Rani, the young assistant who reveals herself as a much more complex individual than he had first imagined, and while he had envisaged a quiet re-acquaintance with his homeland, Thomas finds himself becoming more and more entangled with the lives of those around him.'A bittersweet, uplifting tone makes it impossible to put down … Kalayil writes beautifully, painting colourful portraits of her characters and managing her story''s unexpected twists with aplomb' - Scotland on Sunday

Second-Generation South Asian Britons: A Narrative Inquiry into Multilingualism, Heritage Languages, and Diasporic Identity uses the narratives of seven high-professional, second-generation South Asian Britons to explore issues related to Heritage Language learning and maintenance, discourses of identity and the practices of multicultural families in the UK. Through semi-structured interviews conducted in English, the participants of the study provide articulate and reflective accounts of the language dynamics in the families they grew up in, the communities and environs of their childhood, their young adulthoods and their current lives as parents of dual-heritage children. By investigating both the stories that they tell and how they tell them, this study offers insights into how monolingual narratives can be used to comment on multilingualism.