Ira’s Room
Iras Room is devoted to Caribbean writers of note, book talk, conversations with you, the reader, and my own writing , riddled with bullets of rejection and patched up because writing, after all, is life as every writer will tell you.
After dozens of drafts and a dozen years, on July 6th 2022, Peepal Tree Press will publish my memoir, bookended with a weekend spent in St Lucia with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott.
I started creative writing with Caribbean writers, including Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, Monique Roffey, Earl Lovelace, Jacob Ross and Marlon James. I honed the demanding craft of creative writing with UK based writers such as Maggie Gee, Gillian Slovo, and James Scudamore.
My first memory is my grandmother reading me Arabian nights on a rainy day in Bangalore, watching the leaves of her roses fall and monkeys leap on the branches of her mango tree. I never wanted her voice to stop or the story to end.
At eight, my mother gave me a copy of Jane Austen's Emma with the inscription "Be good, sweet maid and let your beauty shine." I was neither good nor beautiful, but she set me on the trail of devouring the world through books in a wildly haphazard way.
I read everything from comics, the twee Enid Blyton, the Ramayana, my father's copy of Lawrence Durrel’s The Alexandria Quartet and Vikram Seth. Books transported, comforted, elevated me so at University Literature was pleasure. One lonely cold Christmas in London lodging near rumbling train lines, I discovered Virginia Woolf's ‘The Waves’, leading to my devouring everything by the Bloomsbury group and that time.
I read through contractions in childbirth, while breastfeeding, waiting for my brothers' cancer diagnosis, standing in thousands of lines for a lifetime of chores. I've been writing a diary since I was nine or ten and have never stopped. I wrote my first novel in lockdown. Touching Dr Simone was longlisted for the Bath Novel Award 2021. Judges chose 31 Novels out of a global submission of 2,058 novels.
I would love to know what you read and why you turn to books. Please engage and comment in the section below.
I was thrilled to meet Kazuo Ishiguro in The Tabernacle in Nottinghill in London 2017, the year he won the Nobel Prize for literature. Ishiguro is one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world. He has received four Man Booker Prize nominations and won the award in 1989 for his novel The Remains of the Day. Ishiguro's 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go, was named by Time as the best novel of the year and was included in the magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. His characters become embedded in you like people you know, like people whose minds you can change, like people you root for.
With Derek Walcott at a signing for his books. Born in Saint Lucia, a former British colony in the West Indies, poet and playwright. In 1992, Walcott won the Nobel Prize in Literature for Omeros, an epic poem divided into seven "books" containing a total of sixty-four chapters.