Minoli Salgado

Much of her recent work reflects upon the Sri Lankan civil war. Her story on a suicide bomb blast, ‘Too Many Legs’, was Highly Commended in the Commonwealth Short Story competition in 2009 and subsequently commercially produced on CD by the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association. In 2012 she was selected to represent Sri Lanka in London’s Poetry Parnassus, part of the Cultural Olympiad.

She is best known for her novel of memory and loss, A Little Dust on the Eyes. It is set in the south coast of Sri Lanka and reflects upon the thousands of disappearances engendered by war and natural disaster. The book won the inaugural SI Leeds Literary Prize and was longlisted for the DSC Prize in South Asian Literature.

She continues to explore - through both fiction and critical work - the ways in which writing provides a means of bearing witness to political violence and trauma. A Little Dust on the Eyes has been translated into Slovene, and her short story 'Heart' was recently translated into Russian and published in Moscow in Under the Skies of South Asia: Territory and Belonging by Anna Bochkovskaya.

Read The Sunday Times Sri Lanka's interview with Minoli Salgado.

See Minoli read her poem for Poetry Parnassus.