
Born in London to Sri Lankan parents and educated in the UK, where he graduated from UEA’s Creative Writing MA, Praveen Herat currently resides in Paris. But it was a three-year period living in Phnom Penh that marked him profoundly as a writer. There, he grasped that his experience as a first-generation immigrant and itinerant emigrant, navigating constantly between the center and the periphery, had profound parallels with a number of quintessential contemporary experiences. The key protagonists in his novel Between This World and the Next manifest this in different ways: through struggling with the complex legacy of their mixed-race heritage; through the experience of being exiled from wider society as a slave, and through being consumed by the lust for status and power in the lawless void that followed the fall of Soviet communism. During a ten-year period of researching and writing a book that charts the evolution of transnational crime across numerous locations, which include not only Cambodia but Ukraine, Dubai, and Liberia, he has pursued a diversity of professional opportunities, including working with victims of violent crime and domestic abuse, and project-managing museum events.The company of friends makes me find warmth when I am lonely.