"'Some twenty years ago, I was struck by a photo showing barefoot women on the road facing the armed police. They were Chagossian women protesting in Mauritius with astonishing determination.' This photo, which she's never forgotten, is the inspiration for the Mauritian novelist and journalist Shenaz Patel's third book. Mingling various voice, Patel describes, in a bitter, clear-cut style, the tragedy of the inhabitants of the Chagos, those coral islands of the Indian Ocean that were turned into an American military base and whose inhabitants had been banished to Mauritius between 1967 and 1972. With a prose that seeps and stings, and a sharp sensibility, Shenaz Patel breathes life into the painful nostalgia, the lingering memories, and the eternal incomprehension of these expelled from a string of lost islands."
About the Author:Shenaz Patel is a journalist and writer from the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean. She has been a Reuter fellow, worked as editor in chief of a political newspaper, before setting up of the arts, culture and society section of one of Mauritius' biggest weekly where she still works as a columnist. Patel has published four novels, numerous short stories in French and Mauritian Creole, two plays, three graphic novels, and four children's books. She was an IWP (International Writers Program) Honorary Fellow in the U.S. in 2016, and was a fellow at the Hutchins Centre-W.E.B du Bois Institute at Harvard University in 2018.
