Ravinder Randhawa

Last updated

Ravinder Randhawa
Born1952
India
OccupationWriter
Language English
NationalityBritish
Citizenship United Kingdom
Website
ravinderrandhawa.com

Ravinder Randhawa (born 1952) [1] is a British Asian novelist and short story writer. She founded the Asian Women Writers' Collective, an organisation for British Asian women writers.

Contents

Life

Randhawa was born in India in 1952, but moved to England with her parents when she was seven years old, [2] and grew up in Warwickshire. [3] She has worked with an organisation setting up refuges and resource centres for Asian women, and participated in antiracism campaigns. [2] As of 2014, she was living in London. [3]

Randhawa is the subject of a chapter in British Asian Fiction: Twenty-first Century Voices by Sarah Upstone. [4] Upstone writes that Randhawa "was essential to the burgeoning British Asian literature" and "not only wrote prolifically about the lives of British Asian women, but also fostered the careers of others, including Meera Syal." [5]

Work

In 1984, she founded the Asian Women Writers' Collective, which has published multiple collections of Asian women writers works. Her first novel A Wicked Old Woman is described as "a pioneering work of fiction", "one of the first [novels] to be published by a British Asian writer in the postwar period", and "a linguistically and structurally playful text that seems to foreground itself as artwork." The Coral Strand, published in 2001, was reissued as A Tiger's Smile. It "moves between pre-Independence Bombay and contemporary London" and "shifts seamlessly between places and states of mind, physical settings and stream of consciousness, between poetic prose and documentary realism". [3]

Selected publications

Contributed works

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References

  1. Donnell, Alison (2002). "Ravinder Randhawa". Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture. Routledge. ISBN   9781134700240 . Retrieved 11 October 2014.
  2. 1 2 Fister, Barbara (1995). "Randhawa, Ravinder". Third World Women's Literatures: A Dictionary and Guide to Materials in English . Greenwood Publishing Group. p.  256. ISBN   978-0-313-28988-0.
  3. 1 2 3 "Ravinder Randhawa". LIterature: Writers. British Council . Retrieved 11 October 2014.
  4. Upstone, Sarah (2010). "3: Ravinder Randhawa". British Asian Fiction: Twenty-First-Century Voices. Manchester UP. pp. 62–81. ISBN   9780719078323.
  5. Upstone, Sara (2010). British Asian Fiction: Twenty-first Century Voices: Ravinder Randhawa. Manchester Scholarship Online. doi:10.7228/manchester/9780719078323.001.0001. ISBN   9780719078323 . Retrieved 11 October 2014.Abstract of chapter, available online