Category: Project #3: Author Portfolio

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Monica Ali: a brief biography

Monica Ali was born in 1967 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her father was a teacher; her mother a counselor.
In 1971, when Ali was three, her family moved to Bolton, England, where she was enrolled in school.
Ali’s father adored R.K. Narayan and she devoured him as a child. She also read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; Flaubert and Zola; Austin and Hardy. Ali acknowledges these writers had all made a deep impression on her and perhaps even influenced her own work.
Ali did not begin writing until much later. She attended Oxford, where she studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. After college, she briefly worked in marketing.
Ali began writing only after she had her first child. Once she became a mother, Ali says she remembered the stories her father had told her as a child and felt a duty to preserve them, if only for her own children.
So Ali joined a short story forum on the internet, where writers anonymously exchanged work and shared feedback. This sharpened Ali’s critical skills and allowed her to discover her own voice. She immediately recognized the short story form was too confining and wanted to write a novel. This would later become Brick Lane

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Charles Dickens Image Gallery

Entrance to the Charles Dickens Museum in London. This used to be Dickens’ home when he was writing his earlier novels, like The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist.
Published between 1833 and 1836, Sketches by Boz was a collection of short stories that Dickens created under the pseudonym “Boz.” Dickens adopted the name from a character called Moses in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield.
Dickens’ copy of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. 1834. Professor of English John Mullan writes, “It is telling that, Shakespeare apart, the English literary work to which Dickens refers most often is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a novel that, in the mid-nineteenth century, was on the dubious border between literature and popular entertainment” (Introduction, The Artful Dickens).
Dickens the Great Magician (c.1880s) by Joseph Clayton Clarke Kyd. Dickens loved being an entertainer, which also translated to an interest in performing magic tricks.
Charles Dickens giving a public reading of the chapter from Oliver Twist where Bill murders Nancy. 16 March, 1870. The intersection of literary Dickens and popular entertainer Dickens.
Dombey and Son worksheet, recto. From the very first outlines of the plot, we can already see Dickens has a relatively clear idea of where the story might lead him.
Untitled frontispiece for Dombey and Son; published along with the last issue on April, 1848.
Staplehurst rail crash; 9 June, 1865. Dickens was a passenger on the train along with Ellen Ternan, and in this image he is depicted helping the other injured passengers. Dickens never fully recovered from this accident.
Dickens in America. Dickens traveled to North America in 1842, during which time he wrote American Notes for General Circulation. Historian David Olusoga points out, “That Victorian capacity for being passionately committed to anti-slavery as both a moral principle and an article of British national identity while at the same time holding old racial ideas and dabbling in new ones can be seen in the writings of one of the most famous men of the age, Charles Dickens…Dickens’ vivid heartfelt denunciation of American slavery exists on the same pages as his highly derogatory racialized descriptions of the black people he encountered…There is no question that Dickens’ revulsion at slavery was real and that it stayed with him in later life, but so did his dislike of black people and their physical appearance” (Chapter 7, Black and British).
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Zadie Smith: A Life in Pictures

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Samuel Selvon: A Life in Pictures

Pauline Henriques and Samuel Selvon reading a story on the BBC in 1952, during the weekly Caribbean Voices segment.
A 2016 photo of Naparima College, San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago. After completing his primary education, Samuel Selvon attended school here from 1937-1938. He left in 1938, without having completed his school certificate examination.
A photo of Susamachar Presbyterian Church, taken in 2016. In 1947, Samuel Selvon married his first wife, Draupadi Persaud, at this San Fernando church.
A 2013 photo of India House, the building where the High Commission of India in London is located. The building was completed in 1930. When Samuel Selvon first moved to London in 1950, he worked as a clerk in this building.
The cover of A Brighter Sun, Samuel Selvon’s first novel. The novel was published in 1952.
The 1956 cover of The Lonely Londoners. Popularly considered Samuel Selvon’s best novel, this book follows a group of West Indian immigrants as they navigate an often hostile London environment. This novel was also made famous by Selvon’s choice to use dialect in both the dialogue and the narration of the novel.
A 1979 aerial photo of the University of Victoria campus. After Samuel Selvon moved to Canada in 1978 with his second wife, Althea Daroux, and his family, he took up a position teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at this university.
Samuel Selvon in his office at the University of Calgary. Before becoming a writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary, Samuel Selvon worked for months as a janitor at the university.
This 1974 photo of Samuel Selvon, John La Rose, and Andrew Salkey is entited “The Lime.” La Rose and Salkey were founding members of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), which was organized in London and was active from 1966-1972. The Trinidad-born photographer, Horace Ové, is known as one of the leading Black independent filmmakers in post-war Britain. He was the first Black British filmmaker to direct a feature-length film, Pressure (1975).
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Samuel Selvon: A Brief Biography of a Trinidadian Expatriate

Samuel Selvon

Samuel Selvon was born on May 20, 1923 in Trinidad, the sixth of seven children born to Bertwyn Selvon, an Indian cocoa merchant, and Daisy Dickson, a biracial Anglo-Indian. Selvon grew up in a middle-class home; after he completed his primary education in 1937, he attended Naparima College. However, Selvon left the college in 1938, without taking the school certificate examination. He enlisted in the Trinidad Royal Navy Reserve in 1939 and became a wireless operator. Thereafter, he moved to the Port of Spain where he worked for the Trinidad Guardian. He also wrote stories and columns under several pseudonyms, including Ack-Ack, Michael Wentworth, and Esses. In 1947, Selvon married Draupadi Persaud, with whom he had one child, born after the couple relocated to London in 1950. In London, Selvon worked as a clerk for the Indian Embassy, and wrote in his spare time. His first novel, A Brighter Sun, was published in 1952. This debut novel was followed by the publication of several more novels (including The Lonely Londoners in 1956), a collection of short stories entitled Ways of Sunlight (1958), and a collection of plays named Highway in the Sun (1991). In 1962, Selvon and Persaud divorced, and in 1963, Selvon married Althea Daroux, with whom he had three children. From 1975-1977, Selvon held a fellowship in creative writing at Dundee University. In 1978, Selvon moved to Canada, where Daroux had relatives. He took up writer-in-residence appointments at the universities of Victoria, Winnipeg, Alberta, and Calgary (where he worked for a few months as a janitor when he first arrived in Canada). A lifelong smoker, Selvon died of respiratory failure due to chronic lung disease on April 16, 1994.

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Monica Ali: A Life in Pictures

Award-winning author Monica Ali.
A main street in Bolton, Ali’s hometown after she moved from Dhaka.
Ali graduated from Wadham College, Oxford University with a degree in PPE.
Monica Ali with her two children, Shumi and Felix.
The book cover for Ali’s first novel, Brick Lane.
A still from the film adaptation of Ali’s novel.
Ali’s second novel, Alentejo Blue, was set in this idyllic Portuguese town where Ali owns a holiday home.
Book cover for Ali’s third novel, In the Kitchen.
Ali speaks at the Oxford Union Society “People who shape our world” on “immigration of good for Britain”.
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An Overnight Success: A Brief Biography of Monica Ali

Monica Ali is an award-winning, best-selling writer. She is most renowned for her breakthrough novel Brick Lane, which brought attention to the Bangladeshi immigrant experience in London.

Monica Ali.

Ali is the daughter of English and Bangladeshi parents and was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1967. In 1971, aged three, Ali’s family moved to Bolton, England, in order to escape the civil war that erupted in Pakistan. After attending the Bolton School, she studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University and graduated from Wadham College. She then entered the field of publishing, working in the marketing department of a small publishing house before moving into sales and marketing management positions at the publishing house Verso. Ali married a consultant, Simon Torrance, and gave birth to her first child in 1999. She subsequently begun to experiment with writing fiction, but soon found that short stories did not suit her. After giving birth to her second child in 2001, Ali’s father died. His death prompted her to begin work on her first novel, “Brick Lane”. It was published in 2003 to critical acclaim and was adapted into a film released in 2007. Ali now lives in London with her family.