Portrait of an Island on Fire

A deeply moving and revelatory reading experience, the essays collected in Portrait of an Island on Fire form a searing account of Mauritius at a crucial moment in its history.

Unceasing in its critiques of racist, patriarchal abuses of power, in its unpicking of the ills at the core of contemporary Mauritian society and their roots, the collection is a milestone in thinking about the lasting social and political effects of colonialism and how they play out at the level of government policy, the handling of environmental issues, in schools, in hospitals, in families, in language. For all its well-placed anger, Ariel Saramandi’s sparklingly intelligent and intimate debut is full of love and momentum - a push for a better future for Mauritius and, by extension, for the world.

Ariel Saramandi is an Anglo-Mauritian writer living in Mauritius. Her fiction and essays have been published by Granta, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The White Review, among others. She has reported on Mauritius for the likes of the BBC and NBC. Her work has been supported by the Tin House Winter Workshop 2023 and the Stinging Fly Summer School 2023. She is a member of the MMM’s Commission de Développement Durable.