BIOGRAPHY
Monica Ali is a bestselling writer whose work has been translated into 26 languages. She is the author of five books: Brick Lane, Alentejo Blue, In the Kitchen, Untold Story and Love Marriage.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2003 was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. She has been nominated for, amongst others, the Booker Prize, the George Orwell Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and in the U.S. has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University, New York, where she was a visiting Professor, and from 2015 to 2018 she was Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Surrey.
Brick Lane was turned into feature film produced by Film Four, starring Tannishtha Chatterjee, directed by Sarah Gavron and written by Abi Morgan. Monica is currently adapting her fifth novel, Love Marriage, for television in conjunction with New Pictures.
Monica is Patron of Hopscotch Women’s Centre, a charity that was originally set up by Save the Children to support ethnic minority families who had come to join their partners in the UK. The organisation became independent in 1998 and continues to empower women and girls to achieve their full potential.
Monica Ali’s latest novel is Love Marriage.
‘As subsequent novels appeared [after Brick Lane] it became clear that Monica Ali was a different sort of novelist altogether; a more universal voice, a writer who disappeared entirely within the world of her fiction, confounding those who initially saw her as a mouthpiece for a particular constituency.’