Melville was born in Guyana; her mother was English, and her father Guyanese of mixed race, "part South American Indian, African and Scottish". A professional actor before she became a writer, Melville appeared in 1967, and was most active during the 1980s, including such films as Mona Lisa and The Long Good Friday, along with television roles that include appearances in the sitcoms The Young Ones and Girls on Top. Melville's first book, Shape-Shifter, was published in 1990. The collection of short stories won a number of awards, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award. A number of the stories deal with post-colonial life in the Caribbean, particularly in her native Guyana, as well as of some stories being set in London. Many of her characters, most of them displaced people from former colonies struggling to come to terms with a new life in Britain, attempt to find an identity, to reconcile their past and to escape from the restlessness hinted at in the title. Salman Rushdie described the collection as "notably sharp, funny, original...part Caribbean magic, part London grime, written in a slippery, chameleon language that is a frequent delight". Her first novel, The Ventriloquist's Tale, won the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guyana Prize for Literature, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. In the book – which one reviewer characterised as "a unique look at the conflicts of ancient and modern ways" – Melville explores the nature of fiction and storytelling and writes about the impact of European colonisers on Guyanese Amerindians through the story of a brother and sister. Her 1998 collection, The Migration of Ghosts, is a book of complex layered tales of physical and emotional displacement. According to one reviewer: "A magnificent sense of pacing is the first of Melville's skills that impresses the reader of this mesmerizing collection. The second is her gift for voices... she has an amazing range, from West Indians in London celebrating carnival, to the self-conscious, resentful Macusi Indian brought by her literal-minded British husband to a wedding in London, to the irritable Canadian wife whose husband has been sent to Guyana for two years to serve as unofficial liar for a mining corporation. Magic realism is the label most readers and critics will paste on Melville's work... it is an appropriate but incomplete description. The dozen stories spill over with musical chaos and sly humor.... The magic in Melville's eccentric tales is neither good nor bad, white nor black, but the magic of the teeming pluralness and the many possibilities of life." Her novel Eating Air, published in 2009, was called by The Independent "a virtuoso performance, playing with a gallimaufry of characters". Interviewed in 2010, she said: "Being a writer is like being a window-cleaner in a house or a castle where the windows are obscured by dirt and grime. Writing is like cleaning the windows so that people can see a view of the world they have never seen before." In November 2012, Melville delivered a lecture entitled "Guyanese Literature, Magic Realism and the South American Connection" in the Edgar Mittelholzer Memorial Lecture series at the Umana Yana in Georgetown.
Prizes and awards
1990 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Shape-Shifter
1990 Guardian Fiction Prize for Shape-Shifter
1991 PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award for Shape-Shifter
1997 Whitbread First Novel Award for The Ventriloquist's Tale
1998 Orange Prize for Fiction for The Ventriloquist's Tale
1998 Guyana Prize for Literature for The Ventriloquist's Tale
