Ruvani is Professor of Global Literature at the Department of English, King’s College London. Born in Sri Lanka, she grew up in Britain and read English Literature at the University of Bristol (BA) and University of Oxford (DPhil). Before joining King’s College London in 2007, Ruvani taught at the universities of Peradeniya and Kelaniya in Sri Lanka. She served on the jury for the Gratiaen Prize in 2002 and 2024.

Ruvani writes about postcolonial and contemporary literature and film, especially relating to South Asia, the South Asian diaspora and Sri Lankan Writing in English. Her books on South Asian writing in Britain have been concerned with a rethinking of British cultural history through a re-mapping of the place of South Asian minorities within it. Ruvani is lead editor of South Asians Shaping the Nation, 1870-1950: A Sourcebook (2012) and co-editor (with Alex Tickell) of Delhi: New Literatures on the Megacity (2020).

Recently, Ruvani decided to turn to biography to tell a story of change and the reshaping of post-war multicultural Britain through the life of Hanif Kureishi, one of Britain’s most provocative, versatile and popular writers. Drawing on Kureishi’s original literary archive and on interviews with Kureishi’s family, friends and with the author himself, she is the author of the first biography of Hanif Kureishi. Published by Manchester University Press in 2023, her biography is represented by the Wylie Agency.

Top Titles

• Hanif Kureishi: Writers and their Works (2002)
• South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation (2007)
• Contemporary South Asian Women’s Fiction: Gender, Narration and Globalisation (2016)
• Hanif Kureishi. Writing the self: a biography (2023)