Scorpio Books and Moa Press warmly invite you to an author talk featuring Shana Chandra, author of Banjara. Set in Aotearoa, Australia, India and Fiji, Banjara is an essential reimagining of Indo-Fijian Girmitiya history, and a love letter to our ancestors whose stories live on in our genes. Shana will talk about the history that inspired her novel and be available for questions from the audience.

Shana Chandra is a Tamaki Makaurau-born writer, researcher and educator of Indo-Fijian heritage and Girmitiya descent, currently based in Limoges, France. Her writing voices the history of her displaced and forgotten indentured-labourer ancestors in their words, repairing and restoring it from beneath the empire’s shadow and exploring how the violence and complexities of their indenture rooted into her life growing up in Aotearoa. After living in Japan and Naarm (Melbourne), in 2016 she completed her Masters of Creative Writing at the University of Technology in Sydney. Her writing has appeared in Lindsay, Love in the Time of Covid Chronicle, UTS Anthology: The Light Borrowers and Landfall magazine. For the past decade Shana has also worked as a freelance writer and has been featured in international fashion, arts and culture publications.

All welcome, this is a free event. Refreshments provided. Please send in your RSVP.