‘Ariel Saramandi is a courageous and mesmerising new voice, a chronicler of contemporary Mauritius whose writing refracts the influences of her Mauritian compatriots, Ananda Devi, Nathacha Appanah and Shenaz Patel in French, Lindsey Collen in English, in a voice which is wholly her own. Portrait of an Island on Fireunpicks the knots of Mauritius’s entangled histories – of plantation slavery, of indentured labour, of colonisation, of communalism and patriarchy – laying out the threads which make up her own history of ancestral oppression and structure her lived experience of privilege and pain; which form the fabric of contemporary capitalist Mauritius, and its particular intersections of race, class, gender, and language – its politics – and its particular forms of the white supremacy, anti-Blackness and toxic masculinity acted out on the bodies of those without power the world over. Saramandi is laser-focused in her rage, joyful in both her refusal to look away, and in her insistence on what sustains her: writing, motherhood, her marriage, friendships, community – and the beauty of her island.’
― Natasha Soobramanien, co-author of Diego Garcia

Available on 19 June 2025 in the UK. Pre-orders now open here.

Ariel Saramandi is a Mauritian writer.

Her non-fiction has been published in Granta, The White Review, PEN Transmissions, the LA Review of Books and other places. Her fiction has most recently been published in the Brooklyn Rail. Her translation of Gilbert Ahnee’s Exils was published in The White Review’s Translation Anthology in 2024.

She has reported on Mauritius for the likes of the BBC and NBC. She is an alumni of the Tin House Winter Workshop 2023 and the Stinging Fly Summer School 2023. She was awarded a grant by the Society of Authors in 2024 for her essay collection, Portrait of an Island on Fire, which will be published on 19 June 2025 by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Translation