Shirley Chew is Emeritus Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Leeds and Visiting Professor of English at the School of Humanities & Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2006. She was educated in Singapore and at Oxford. Her main areas of interest include literature from Commonwealth countries, in particular South Asia, Australia, and Canada; contemporary British poetry and fiction; and Victorian literature. She is currently working on A History of Postcolonial Commonwealth Literature 1947-2000 and a study of the novelist Anita Desai.