The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Melanie Singh Hughes is the author of Delhi – City of Spies. She began writing for Ken Russell in the television series Lady Chatterley and then worked on further projects for the BBC, London Films, and Union Pictures. Melanie is also the author of Mrs Fisher’s Tulip, War Changes Everything and Midnight Legacy.
Melanie was born and raised in London. She attended Heathfield School and hated the blinkered conformity and asinine rules. She then went to the sublime, if crazy, Town & Country School where the collection of oddballs and intellectuals who ran it introduced her to art, literature and music; she was very happy there. Then came the Lycee Francais de Londres. By now, her love of the theatre overcame her fear of punishment and she spent many afternoons bunking off to see the inspiring and thought provoking plays performed by Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre at the Old Vic.
She trained to be an actress at the Central School of Speech & Drama. Starting her acting career at Southwold Summer Theatre, she worked extensively in television, films and theatre.
Mrs Fisher’s Tulip, based on a family archive, tell the story of a modern woman in a not yet modern age.
War Changes Everything, set in London, deals with the Italian community and the tumultuous years of political upheaval during the 1930s and the Second World War. Nita, the heroine, lives through the Blitz and travels to India as part of a troop convoy, surviving an Atlantic crossing at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic. The novel has been translated into Italian and is a set text at Italian universities.
Midnight Legacy is set in India and deals with Nita’s struggles as a divorced woman at the end of the Raj and the bloodshed of Partition.
Melanie has given talks and readings at The British Italian Society, Clare College Cambridge, Kent, Catania and Bologna universities and the Holborn Library. Midnight Legacy was launched at the Nehru Centre in London—the cultural wing of the Indian High Commission—with readings and a talk on the historical background of the book.
Melanie’s latest novel, Delhi – City of Spies, is the true story of an unsolved murder set in Delhi in the 1950s, as the post-war superpowers vie for influence in India.
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