Peepal Tree scoops 'hardhitting' memoir from Trinidad media star Mathur

Peepal Tree Press has scooped a "hardhitting" memoir from Trinidad media star Ira Mathur.

Hannah Bannister from Peepal Tree Press bought rights to Love The Dark Days directly from the author. It will be published on 7th July 2022. 

The memoir follows Mathur "growing up as Dolly, the older and darker daughter in a privileged but dysfunctional Indian family who bring their intergenerational traumas to the very different worlds of Trinidad and Tobago".

Mathur is an Indian-born Trinidadian multimedia journalist and a Sunday Guardian columnist and author. She was longlisted for the 2021 Bath Novel Award for Touching Dr Simone.  In 2019 she was longlisted for the Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers' Prize and in 2018 she was shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize, the Lorian Hemmingway short story competition and the Small Axe Literary Competition.

Publisher Jeremy Poynting said: "This is a book that has all the vividness of character, dialogue, and scene of the best novels with the added power that one knows it is confronting and coming to terms with the painful truths of actual experience."

Mathur added: "Peepal Tree, a press beloved by all West Indians wherever they are, has always published books that tell unique New World stories of a people moving between the past and present; between strands of old continents, a people re-creating themselves out of damaged histories. I can’t think of another publisher more perfect for my memoir."