Ali, Monica (1967- ) novelist

Born in 1967 in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Monica Ali is the author of Brick Lane (2003), a novel about the Bangladeshi immigrant families living in and around the East London street famous since the 1970s for Indian cuisine. The daughter of a Bangladeshi father and an English mother, Ali grew up in Bolton, England, and completed her education at Wadham College, Oxford, where she studied philosophy, politics, and economics.

Brick Lane’s central character is Nazneen, who emigrates at the age of 18 from a small village in Bangladesh to become a garment worker in London and to enter into an arranged marriage with Chanu, who is more than twice her age. Ali vividly portrays Nazneen’s narrow existence. She speaks no English and seldom ventures from her flat in East London’s Tower Hamlets section. She lives in England but longs to return to Dhaka, even as the letters she receives from her sister, Hasina, indicate that life in Bangladesh is undergoing vast changes. Nazneen’s life unfolds with its share of domestic tragedy and tribulation. While her husband longs to return home despite his failure to achieve success in London, Nazneen’s life changes as she enters into a passionate adulterous relationship with Karim, a community leader and middleman who brings her garments to sew.

Through Nazneen the novel explores the question of whether or not individuals can shape the courses of their lives, and it has been praised for its masterful depiction of immigrant life and sensitive portrayal of the impact of the destruction of the World Trade Center on Muslim communities such as Nazneen’s. Even before the novel appeared in print, Ali was named by Granta as Best of Young British Novelists.

While Brick Lane garnered a number of awards in 2003, including the British Book Award for Newcomer of the Year and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Ali has also come in for criticism of her representation of Bangladeshis, especially the Sylheti, as stereotypical, and she has been accused of catering to negative British perceptions. This criticism intensified when in 2006 plans were announced to make a film of the novel. Ali was attacked by Germaine Greer in the Guardian on this account, but Salman Rushdie came to the young author’s defense. The film version of Brick Lane appeared in 2007.

In 2006 Ali’s second full-length fiction, Alen- tejo Blue appeared. Set in Portugal in the village of Mamarrosa, Ali offers a fragmentary portrait of the community through a set of stories connected largely by geography. A pig farmer, a cafe owner, a slovenly Englishwoman and her family, an alcoholic writer, an au pair, and various visitors are all given voices that do not seem to be aware of the existence of one another. While meticulously conveying the ambience of the cork-forested regions of southern Portugal, Alentejo Blue is a work of isolated voices. “In Alentejo Blue,” Liesl Schillinger has written, “Ali’s characters are trapped in their own heads.”