Vahni Capildeo

Vahni Capildeo
Born	1973 Port of Spain, Trinidad
Nationality	Trinidadian
Occupation	Writer
Notable work	Measures of Expatriation (2016 Forward Prize for Poetry)

Surya Vahni Priya Capildeo (born 1973) is a Trinidadian writer, and a member of the extended Capildeo family that has produced notable Trinidadian politicians and writers (including V. S. Naipaul, a cousin of Capildeo's, and Neil Bissoondath).

Born in 1973 in Port of Spain, Vahni Capildeo has lived in the United Kingdom since 1991.

She read English at Christ Church, Oxford, and was subsequently awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to pursue graduate work in Old Norse and translation theory, also at Christ Church/the Faculty of English Language and Literature. This led to her DPhil, "Reading Egils saga Skallagrímssonar: saga, paratext, translations", awarded in 2001.

She intermitted from a Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, in 2000–04 in order to spend time in Trinidad and Jamaica. This produced No Traveller Returns (Salt, 2003), a book-length poem sequence characterized by a reviewer as "a discontinuous meditation on identity and self-awareness. These are merciless poems — mercilessly observant, mercilessly precise", and One Scattered Skeleton, a non-fiction book on the palimpsestic nature of place, memory, and language that takes its title from a poem by the Guyanese poet Martin Carter and moves between the U.K., the Caribbean, and Iceland. Extracts from One Scattered Skeleton have appeared in London: City of Disappearances (ed. Iain Sinclair), Stand Magazine, The Arts Journal (Guyana) and The Caribbean Review of Books.

Person Animal Figure, a set of 45 dramatic monologues in three voices but possibly one character, was published by Jeremy Noel-Tod's Landfill Press in 2005 (http://www.landfillpress.co.uk).

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