Profile: Leela Dutt

About This Author

Leela Dutt is an outsider, having grown up in Golders Green with an Indian father and a Danish mother. She read history at Oxford and has worked as a teacher, a shop assistant and a journalist, and a proof-reader for The Big Issue Cymru. She wrote her first novel Rubik’s Cube while bringing up teenagers; it’s more autobiographical than her later work, and reflects Leela’s fascination with the way that different strands in life get entangled: family, friends and neighbours, the Cold War in the 1980s, involvement with her local Quaker Meeting. In her subsequent computing degree Leela was particularly interested in artificial intelligence, which inspired her second novel Mathison. She then held a post at Cardiff University setting up a database about housing research. She’s been a Quaker in South Wales for half her life, and when Friends House in London invited her to put together a collection of short stories about Quakers, it turned into Kingfisher Blue. Having never known her own grandparents, she has had enormous pleasure from the company of her seven grandchildren, of whom six survive. Leela is married to Robin Attfield the writer and philosopher; she has travelled widely over the years, both on Robin’s lecture tours and visiting relations. When their older children were very small they lived for a year in Nigeria. Her latest novel Only a Signal Shown reflects her overseas travel. All Leela Dutt’s books can be ordered from www.wonderbookland.com/leela-dutt Only a Signal Shown is on Kindle for £2.06 and a paperback for £7.99 Rubik’s Cube, Mathison and Kingfisher Blue are all available to order on the Wonderbookland site as paperbacks, or they can be ordered by post from 22 Lon-y-deri, Cardiff CF14 6JN with a cheque to Leela Attfield. The cost is £3.50 including postage. From the same site you can read online at no cost a few of Leela’s short stories and some articles and book reviews she’s written. Leela is always glad to hear from people who have read her work! Website: www.leeladutt.co.uk Blog: http://leeladutt.wordpress.com