Ruvani Ranasinha
Ruvani Ranasinha (DPhil Oxon) is Professor of Global Literature in the Department of English Literature at King’s College London, specialising in postcolonial literature, the history of the book, immigration, transnational feminism, globalisation, and life-writing. With a focus on South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, she rethinks British and global cultural history through the experiences of South Asian minorities. She is the author of South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation (Oxford University Press, 2007) and Contemporary South Asian Women’s Fiction: Gender, Narration and Globalisation (Palgrave 2016). She is also the lead editor of South Asians Shaping the Nation, 1870-1950: A Sourcebook (Manchester University Press, 2012) and co-editor (with Alex Tickell) of Delhi: New Literatures on the Megacity (Routledge, 2020).
Recently, she turned to biography to illuminate a broader story of change and the reshaping of post-war Britain, and to tell a story about British multiculturalism through the life of Hanif Kureishi, one of Britain’s most provocative, versatile and popular writers. Drawing on Kureishi’s original literary archive and interviews with Kureishi’s family and the author himself, her critically acclaimed Hanif Kureishi: Writing the self (MUP 2023) is the first biography of the author. In 2026, Ruvani held Visiting Fellowships at Sapienza, University of Rome and St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and was invited to speak at the Ceylon Literature and Arts Festival.
