Niala Maharaj was born in Trinidad to descendants of Indian migrants. At 16, she became a journalist with Trinidad’s national newspaper and rose to editor of the Sunday edition. In between she acquired three university degrees. She then went on to co-produce and co-present Trinidad’s most successful TV series, working simultaneously as Public Relations Officer at the University of the West Indies.

In the late 1980s, she began writing fiction after leaving Trinidad for a peripatetic existence in far-flung parts of the globe. She worked in Rome as editor of an international women’s magazine and later in Hong Kong. In 1990, she settled in Amsterdam, where she contributes articles to publications around the globe.

The Game of the Rose: The Third World in the Global Flower Trade (non-fiction) was her first published book. The novel, Like Heaven, was born when she spent a semester as a Visiting Fellow of Amherst College, Massachusetts. She has also written a collection of short stories, The Queen of Coconut Chutney, and is currently working on a novel, Dance of the Lotus.

The biggest accomplishment of Niala’s life is a circle of amazingly loyal friends around the world: of every nationality, men and women, gay and straight, dead and alive. In her leisure time she reads, gardens, plays squash, and gets beaten by 12-year old kids in stupid internet games. She is the besotted friend of a bunch of children in the Dutch village of Krommenie. She loathes aerobics, is unarithmetic, clumsy and forgetful. After 16 years in Holland, she still cannot ride a bicycle properly, speaks 'defect-Dutch' and is hopeless with the most basic of technological tools.