Pauline Melville

A Guyanese author of mixed European and Amerindian ancestry, Pauline Melville has emerged in the last few years as a leading Caribbean writer, and one of the most accomplished talents on the modern literary scene. Shape-shifter, her first collection of stories, revealed the impressive extent of her abilities, and won the 1991 Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book) and the Guardian Fiction Prize. Her first novel, The Ventriloquist's Tale, won the Whitbread First Novel Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.A professional actress in Europe before making it as a published writer, Melville has a cosmopolitan knowledge of both the Old and the New Worlds, and her fiction informs her experiences with her own mixed cultural heritage, Western philosophy nudging shoulders with Amerindian creation myths and the resulting blend touched with a sardonic, iconoclastic wit.