Broken Jaw

The 87 is a small press, publishing collective, events organiser, and platform for discussion. It was founded in 2018 by South London based poets Kashif Sharma-Patel, Azad Ashim Sharma, and architect Devin Maisuria. We are committed to publishing the very best of bold, innovative and experimental writing from emerging and established writers. We publish poetry, fiction and non-fiction and are especially interested in supporting writers from under-represented, minority groups.

My collection of short stories, Broken Jaw, focuses on the challenges of finding a voice. All the stories were written during or soon after the close of the civil war in Sri Lanka, and speak against silences – official and unofficial – testing the limits of what can be said. The collection is divided into two parts, ‘Rumours’ and ‘Ventriloquy and Other Acts’, that take the reader on a journey from the public world of political conflict to the private space of home, from the dislocations of violence and migration to a personal quest for peace and renewal, charting the emergence of a speaking voice in the context of its suppression and denial.

Minoli Salgado was born in Kuala Lumpur and grew u

Minoli Salgado was born in Kuala Lumpur and grew up in Sri Lanka, South East Asia and England. She was educated at schools in Penang Hill, Colombo (briefly) and North Devon before going on to study English Literature at the universities of Sussex, Manchester and Warwick. After gaining her PhD in Indo-Anglian fiction, she returned to the University of Sussex where she taught postcolonial literature for many years as Tutorial Fellow, Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader and Professor of English.

Though only some of the stories … engage with the war, all of them were written during or soon after the political conflict [the Sri Lankan civil war] and are conditioned by that time … Written between 1990-2011, they are also underscored by an exilic perspective that attempts to give meaning, pattern and shape to a home that appears to be torn apart … The book is divided into two parts – “Rumours” and “Ventriloquy and Other Acts” – that mark the permeable boundaries between public and private selves …. In everyday life, rumours occupy the place where public secrets congregate, They expand and grow in contexts if suppression where official facts are known to be lies. And ventriloquy is … an act of displaced speech … of finding a voice in a new guise.