Selma Carvalho

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​Selma Carvalho is the author of three non-fiction books documenting the Goan presence in East Africa. Between 2011-2014, she directed a large grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund UK to record and document the oral histories of British Goans who formerly lived in East Africa. The project is archived at the British Library, St Pancras, and its findings narrated in the book A railway runs through: Goans of British East Africa. In 2013, she curated the first-ever East African Goan exhibition Past Lives held at the Nehru Centre London, and in 2016, she contextualised 52 rare images in the book Baker butcher, Doctor diplomat: Goan pioneers of East Africa. In 2022, she presented her research on Goans in Zanzibar at the Crossings in the Indian Ocean: memory & heritage conference organised by the State University of Zanzibar and the Instituto Camões, Portugal. In fiction, she has been published in 21 anthologies among them by Kingston University Press UK and Aleph India. She is the author of the novel Sisterhood of Swans (Speaking Tiger, 2021) shortlisted for the Women Writers Prize India, and listed among six notable fiction books of 2021 by Asian Review of Books. She is currently working on, Half-Caste: the in-between people, Goans of Zanzibar, 1850-1910. 

Fields of interest
The Goan presence in East British Africa (Zanzibar and Kenya)

Key words
Goa; Zanzibar; Mombasa; Nairobi; migration; racial relations; imperialism; sub-imperialism; Indian Ocean.

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