I joined the department again at QMUL in 2017. Before that I held posts in several other university departments including Queen Mary from 1992-2000, Cambridge, the University of North London and the University of Portsmouth. I did my undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Kent, supervised by Lyn Innes and Louis James. I have always been interested in issues of cultural difference and diversity having grown up in India, Britain, Holland and Germany and taught in schools where I worked at growing a more inclusive literature curriculum before moving into university teaching in the 1980s. In 1984 I founded the Arts Council-funded literary magazine, Wasafiri: The Magazine of International Contemporary Writing, now housed at QMUL, funded by Arts Council England and co-published with Routledge.
I was given an MBE for my services to literature in 2011 and awarded the RSL Benson Medal for life-time’s contribution in 2019. https://rsliterature.org/2019/06/rsl-elects-45-new-fellows-and-honorary-fellows/
MBE for contribution to Black and Asian Letters 2011; Benson Medal 2019 Royal Society of Literature for lifetime's contribution to Literature; Honorary Fellowship 2020 English Association; Elected Fellow of RSA