Born in Sri Lanka, I grew up in the UK and read English Literature at the University of Bristol (BA) and University of Oxford (DPhil).

I taught at the universities of Peradeniya and Kelaniya in Sri Lanka before joining King’s in 2007.

Currently I am on advisory boards of the ERC-funded Colombo.histories.org project led by Professor Sujit Sivasundarum, University of Cambridge and of the AHRC-funded Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks project.

I was Co-investigator on the Leverhulme-funded International Network: Planned Violence: Postcolonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature (2014-16) and on the AHRC-funded project Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870-1950 (2007-10).

I have held Visiting Professorships at the University of Vienna and will be a Visiting Fellow at St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford in 2026.

I am a member of the International Postcolonial Print Cultures Network, Consultant Editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies and on the editorial board of the feminist digital humanities Orlando project.

Research interests and PhD supervision

My main interests are in postcolonial literature and history, especially relating to South Asia and the South Asian diaspora with a particular focus on:

• gender and feminism
• migration, multiculturalism, globalisation and the cultural representation of Muslim identity
• postcolonial histories of the book
• post-1945 and contemporary British literature and film
• Hanif Kureishi and life-writing
• anglophone Sri Lankan writing

I would be interested in hearing from prospective doctoral students in any of these areas, or in postcolonial and world literature more broadly.

My four books on South Asian writing have been concerned with a rethinking of British and global cultural history through a re-mapping of the place of South Asian minorities within it. South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation (Oxford University Press 2007) is the first book to trace a literary genealogy of South Asian writing in twentieth-century Britain, and to historicise the emergence and development of Britain’s literary market for Asian writers. Contemporary South Asian Women’s Fiction: Gender, Narration and Globalisation (Palgrave 2016) is the first book to analyse a new generation of award-winning anglophone South Asian women novelists and to destabilise the dominance of Indian fiction by focusing on female authors from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as well as India. Recently, I decided to turn to literary biography to illuminate a larger story of change and the reshaping of post-war Britain, and to tell a story about British multiculturalism through the life of Hanif Kureishi, one Britain’s most provocative, versatile and popular writers. Drawing on Kureishi’s original archive and on interviews with Kureishi’s family and the author himself, I have written the first biography of Hanif Kureishi Writing the Self (MUP 2023).

For more details, please see my full research profile.

Teaching

• Contemporary Global Novels
• Postcolonial and World Literature
• Black and Asian Writing in Britain
• Contemporary South Asian Women’s Writing and postcolonial feminism

Expertise and public engagement

• My Q&A at Chiswick cinema on 40th anniversary of Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette
• My podcast on Hanif Kureishi
• My profile of Hanif Kureishi
• My article in the Guardian on Hanif Kureishi
• My article on Jane Austen

 Selected publications

My major publications include:

• Hanif Kureishi. Writing the self: a biography (Manchester University Press 2023).
• Contemporary South Asian Women’s Fiction: Gender, Narration and Globalisation (Palgrave 2016)
• South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation (Oxford University Press 2007)
• Hanif Kureishi: Writers and their Works (Northcote House, 2002)

I am also the lead editor of South Asians Shaping the Nation, 1870-1950: A Sourcebook (Manchester University Press, 2012) and co-editor (with Alex Tickell) of Delhi: New Literatures on the Megacity (Routledge 2020).