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 Saint-Ouen, France. 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 centre 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 power in the lawless void that followed the fall of Soviet communism. The book, which charts the evolution of transnational crime across numerous locations including not only Cambodia but Ukraine, Dubai, and Liberia, is the product of a decade of research and writing.