Pauline Melville is of Guyanese/British origin. She returns frequently to the Caribbean and much of her work has Guyana as its source. Her first book of short stories, Shape-Shifter won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize and the MacMillan Silver Pen award. Her novel The Ventriloquist’s Tale won a Whitbread Prize and was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Another collection of short stories The Migration of Ghosts was nominated by the New York Public Library as one of the best twenty-five books to be published that year. Her new novel Eating Air is to be published in September of this year.