Monica Ali lives in London and was named in 2003 by Granta magazine as one of twenty ‘Best of Young British Novelists’. Her first novel, ‘Brick Lane’, an epic saga about a Bangladeshi family living in the UK, was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and her second, ‘Alentejo Blue’, was published by Doubleday in June 2006.