Mary de Sousa is a half-Indian, half-Irish journalist who grew up Coventry (UK) and has lived and worked in Cyprus, Spain, Pakistan and Cuba before settling in Paris where she works as an English editor. She has written two novels, The Halfie-Halfie Girl, a magical detective story about a mixed-race girl who travels back in time to India and Ireland to find the source of her family’s unhappiness, and Half an Hour from Pakistan, the story of two young British aid workers whose mission to make the world better ends in horror. She recently won a short story competition with Up the Downstairs which forms part of a collection of short stories she is working on titled Mother. Another piece from that collection won her joint first place in the Cercle Littéraire Irlandais’ Celebrating Women with Words writing competition. A third novel, a very black comedy set on an island not unlike Cuba, is in the pipeline.