Vahni Capildeo

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

Born in 1973 in Port of Spain, she has lived in the United Kingdom since 1991. She has one brother, Dr Kavi Capildeo, a consultant oncologist/haematologist.

Capildeo read English at Christ Church, Oxford. She was subsequently awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to pursue graduate work in Old Norse and translation theory, also at Christ Church. She was kindly allowed to intermit from a Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge in 2000-4 in order to spend time in Trinidad and Jamaica. This produced No Traveller Returns (Salt, 2003; http://www.saltpublishing.com), a book-length poem sequence, and One Scattered Skeleton, a non-fiction book on the palimpsestic nature of place, memory, and language which 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 three-character series of dramatic monologues, was published by Jeremy Noel-Tod's Landfill Press in 2005 (http://www.landfillpress.co.uk).

Capildeo has undertaken casual and fulltime work at the Oxford English Dictionary. She has worked for a women's helpline as a volunteer and a volunteer trainer.

In 1999, she married David Groiser (fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford), a poet and an expert in German literature, continental philosophy, and German-Jewish studies. Their marriage dissolved in 2001, and reconciliation failed in 2008. They had no children.

At present she is a contributing editor at the Caribbean Review of Books (edited by Nicholas Laughlin) and is seeking a publisher for a third poetry collection, The Undraining Sea. A fourth poetry collection in the process of revision, Dark and Unaccustomed Words, takes its title from George Puttenham's sixteenth-century Arte of Poesie. This was Puttenham's phrase (not of praise) for arcane or foreign imports into English, but finds greater resonance in a poetic practice that draws on world Englishes.