Fawzia Muradali Kane was born in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago, at the cusp of the country’s changeover from colony to independence. She came to the UK on a scholarship to study architecture. She now lives in London, and is co-director of KMK Architects with Mike Kane.
 
Most of her early work is in the form of dramatic monologues, mainly in the voice of the character “Tantie Diablesse”, a 300-year-old ex-slave from Tobago. The storytelling tradition is still strong in Trinidad and Tobago, with set orders and rhythms in the narrative, and this is a feature she tries to instil in her poems. One sub-set of this tradition, also of interest, is called “robber talk” where real objects and events become hyperbolized into fantastic versions of themselves. Tantie Diablesse (Waterloo Press 2011) is also the name of her first collection, and was a poetry section finalist for the 2012 Bocas Lit Fest Prize.
 
As a poet she has recently become particularly interested in how time can be so precisely expressed in the English language, as compared to other languages. As a result, she is now experimenting in writing directly in other languages (such as Spanish and German), to examine the impact on form and meaning, when these are then translated into English and different languages.
 
Her work has been published in several magazines, including Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Poetry London, the Rialto, The SHOp and The Interpreter’s House. In 2003, she was one of the featured poets of the Poetry School anthology, Entering the Tapestry (Enitharmon). A long sequence Houses of the Dead was published in 2014 by Thamesis Publications, and her first novel La Bonita Cuentista is currently being considered for publication.