Event overview
Join Gitan Djeli, the author of RED MOON AT DAWN, and Dr Maria Del Pilar Kaladeen for a discussion of the novel hosted by the Women's Art Library.
In Red Moon At Dawn, the long shadow of empire stretches over Mauritius. As World War II rages in Europe, islanders face their own, related battles: food shortages, rising prices and a workers’ strike met with lethal colonial force. In this poetic novel, these events are seen through the perceptive but very different eyes of two young women growing into their sense of who they are, and what Mauritius is. Framed through the voices of the rebellious Valerie, a teenage activist, poet and would-be playwright, whose family is divided in their response to the harsh conditions of the sugar estate, and the younger, orphaned and sheltered Anarka, granddaughter of the British-respecting sirdar, but with a different model in her radical and lesbian aunt, Red Moon At Dawn reveals both the emotional cost of empire and the resources on which the characters draw in their resilience and resistance to colonial oppression. Family secrets, adolescent sexual awakening, the divisive distinctions of social status in a colonial sugar economy, race relations and the value of holding onto their ancestral Indian heritage, which contains both patriarchy and resistance to it, are just some of the issues that Valerie, Anarka and their friends encounter.
Gitan Djeli is a creative writer, editor and scholar of Indian Ocean Studies. She has a poetry collection, unrest in the nebulae, with Duke University Press (2026). Red Moon At Dawn (Peepal Tree Press, 2026) is her debut novel. Her creative writings appear in Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, The Funambulist, Doek!, adda, Poetry, Journal for the Study of Indentureship and its Legacies, among others. Gitan Djeli has a PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London and is based in the UK.
Dr Maria del Pilar Kaladeen is an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. She specialises in the study of the history of the system of Indian indenture and has edited two anthologies of writing on this subject. The first anthology, We Mark Your Memory (University of London Press, 2018), focused on writing by descendants of indentured labourers from across the diaspora and included writers from Fiji, Mauritius, St Vincent and Malaysia. The second anthology, The Other Windrush: Legacies of Indenture in Britain’s Caribbean Empire (Pluto Press, 2021),
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 9 Oct 2026 |
6:30pm - 8:30pm Please let Reception know that you are attending this event. |
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