Sheena Kalayil
ZambiaAbout
Sheena Kalayil is an Indian-born British novelist and academic, born in Zambia in 1970 to Indian parents who worked as teachers. She grew up between Zambia and Zimbabwe before moving to the United Kingdom at eighteen. After studying engineering in Wales, she spent years teaching English internationally, working in countries including Mozambique, Tunisia, Nepal, and Venezuela. She holds a doctorate in linguistics and teaches at the University of Manchester, where her academic interests include language and cultural identity. Her debut novel, The Bureau of Second Chances (2017), won the Writers’ Guild Award for Best First Novel. Her subsequent works include The Inheritance (2018) and The Wild Wind (2019). Her fourth novel, The Others (2025), explores migration, belonging, and political upheaval in East Germany in 1989, drawing partly on her own experiences as an international student in Budapest during the fall of the Berlin Wall.
