Eve White: Literary Agent

Mary de Sousa

Mary Preciosa de Sousa is a half-Indian, half-Irish journalist who has lived and worked in Cyprus, Spain and Pakistan. Her first novel, The Halfie-Halfie Girl, is rooted in her childhood, spent in the working class Midlands, and the effects of her mixed race identity and her parents’ divorce. In her twenties she rediscovered her mother’s Irish family but had to wait many years before setting foot in India for the first time where she visited the grave of the grandmother whose name she bears. She is now based in Paris, where she is married to a French journalist and plotting a second novel about a childless woman driven to a desperate act in the aftermath of a disaster. It will draw on her experiences in Pakistan working for a world aid organisation in the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake. The suitcase full of photos, on which The Halfie-Halfie Girl  is based, is still to be found under a bed in her mother’s house.