Biography

Kavita is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Design.

Kavita was born in New Delhi, grew up in Suva and has been living in Australia since 1987. In 2000, she completed her PhD at The Australian National University on the Diasporic Narratives of VS Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. From 2005 to 2007 she was a Lecturer in Literature at The University of the South Pacific.

She is currently writing her first novel: After the Rains which is located in both Australia and Fiji. The novel is a love story between an Indo-Fijian woman and a part Aboriginal man set against the mayhem of the Fiji coups. An extract from the novel has been recently published in the first ever anthology of Fijian- Indian- Australian writing SHIFTING LOCATION : Indo-Fijian Writing From Australia, recently launched at the Sydney Writers Festival, 2009. Before that, she co-edited Writing the Pacific an anthology of poetry and short fiction by Pacific writers including writers from Australia and New Zealand with Dr Jen Webb. In 2005, she edited a book of memoirs by Fiji Indian migrants called Stolen Worlds: Fijiindian Fragments and previously, she co-edited Unfinished Journeys: India File from Canberra (1998); a collection of essays on India by Canberran writers and academics.

She has been the recipient of two writing grants from arts ACT. Her research interests include the Fiji-Indian Australian diaspora and Asian-Pacific Australian writing. In 2006, she received a USP Research Grant for a joint project on the Indo-Fijian diaspora from a cultural and linguistic perspective. In 2007, Kavita was nominated for the Vice Chancellors Award for Research Excellence by the Faculty of Arts and Law, USP. She was the treasurer of PEN Canberra for a number of years and a member of the ACT Arts Cultural Council.

Stolen Worlds

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-141082353.html

Writing the Pacific

http://www.usp.com.fj/index.php?id=5852

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