Pauline Melville
b. 1948
Pauline Melville was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.
Pauline Melville is a British Guyanese writer who has worked at the Royal Court Theatre, the National Theatre and in television, film and cabaret. Her first novel, The Ventriloquist’s Tale, won the Whitbread First Novel Award. Other literary awards include the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Macmillan Silver Pen Award, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Guyana Prize for Literature. Salman Rushdie has described her as ‘one of the few genuinely original writers to emerge in recent years’.
