Susheela Raman (born 21 July 1973) is a British musician. She was nominated for the 2006 BBC World Music Awards. Her debut album Salt Rain was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2001. She is known for energetic, vibrant, syncretic, and uplifting live performances built on the sacred Bhakti and Sufi traditions of India and Pakistan. Biography Early years Susheela Raman's parents are Tamils from Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu, India, who arrived in London, UK in the mid-1960s. At the age of four, Raman and her family left the UK for Australia. Susheela grew up singing Carnatic music and began giving recitals at an early age. She recalls how her family "were eager to keep our Tamil culture alive." As a teenager in Sydney she started her own band, describing its sound as "funk and rock and roll", before branching out into more blues and jazz-based music, which demanded quite different voice techniques. She tried to bring these streams together when in 1995 she travelled to India to rediscover her roots by way of further exploring Carnatic music. Music career Returning to England in 1997, she started to work with her partner, guitarist/producer Sam Mills who had recorded "Real Sugar" with a Bengali singer named Paban Das Baul. According to Raman "it bridged a gap and found common ground for one particular kind of Indian music to be expressed to a new audience." In 1999, Raman co-wrote songs for the album One and One is One by Joi, also performing on the track "Asian Vibes." Mills had worked with West African musicians in the group Tama which also opened musical contact points within the Parisian music scene. Salt Rain After a period of three years collaborating with Sam Mills, Raman released her first album Salt Rain in 2001 on Narada, an American subsidiary of EMI. The album went gold in France and in the UK was shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize. Raman also won the Best Newcomer award from BBC Radio 3. Salt Rain drew on traditional Tamil music blended with jazz-folk and pop influences. It featured original material, as well as old songs Raman sang at recitals when younger. Love Trap In 2003 Raman released her second album Love Trap which featured amongst other collaborators the Nigerian drummer Tony Allen and Tuvan singer Albert Kuvezin of the group Yat-Kha. The title track is a re-interpretation of an Ethiopian