About Pauline Melville
Pauline Melville was born in Guyana in 1948. She has worked as an actress, appearing in films such as Mona Lisa and British television programmes including the BBC Television comedy series ‘The Young Ones’.
Her first book, Shape-Shifter (1990), a collection of short stories, won the Common-wealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book) and the Guardian Fiction Prize. The book consists of a number of short stories dealing with post-colonial life in the Carib-bean, notably in her native Guyana, as well as of some stories set in London. Many of her characters, most of them displaced people