Pauline Melville FRSL (born 1948) is an English/Guyanese-born writer and former actor of mixed European and Amerindian ancestry, who is currently based in London, England. Among awards she has received for her writing – which encompasses short stories, novels and essays – are the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Guyana Prize for Literature. Salman Rushdie has said: "I believe her to be one of the few genuinely original writers to emerge in recent years." Background and early career Melville was born in the former colony of British Guiana (present-day Guyana), where she spent her pre-school years in the 1940s; her mother was English, and her father Guyanese of mixed race, "part South American Indian, African and Scottish". The family moved to south London in the early 1950s, and after leaving school in the early 1960s, Melville worked at London's Royal Court Theatre, which would eventually lead to her becoming a professional actor. She first appeared in films in 1967, and in 1970–74 decided to further her education by doing a course in psychology and economics at Brunel University, then sought to combine art and politics by working with the Joint Stock Theatre Company and the Scottish theatre company 7:84. She also concerned herself with post-independence politics in Guyana and elsewhere in the Caribbean region, teaching literacy in Grenada and working at the Jamaica School of Drama, while beginning to write short stories. As a performer, Melville was most active during the 1980s, appearing in such films as Mona Lisa and The Long Good Friday, along with television roles that include appearances in the sitcoms The Young Ones and Girls on Top. Writing According to Gadfly Online, "Much of Melville's writing is inspired by the people and events she observed while growing up in Guyana, a former British colony which didn't become independent until 1966. As a little girl and a teenager, Melville witnessed the complicated social problems of a nation locked in a desperate struggle to modernize and overcome its imperialist past. Today, an astounding number of cultures coexist in the region, in varying degrees of amicability, from European to Amerindian and African to East Indian, and the Guyanese have dealt with poverty, pollution and shortages of basic commodities, including electrical power." Melville herself said in a 2010 interview: "Being a writer is like being a window-cleaner in a house or