M. M. Kaye

M. M. Kaye was the pen name of Mary Margaret Kaye, a British author born in Simla, India, in 1908. She came from a family with long connections to the British administration and army in India and spent much of her life travelling between India and Britain. Her familiarity with the landscapes, customs and political complexities of the subcontinent became central to her fiction. Before achieving success as a historical novelist, she wrote and illustrated children’s books and published a series of mysteries set in locations including Kashmir, Cyprus, Zanzibar, Kenya and the Andaman Islands.

Kaye is best known for The Far Pavilions, an expansive novel of love, identity and imperial conflict set principally in nineteenth-century India and Afghanistan. Her other major historical novels include Shadow of the Moon, centred on the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and Trade Wind, set amid nineteenth-century commerce and slavery around Zanzibar. Combining romance and adventure with detailed descriptions of court life, military campaigning and cultural division, her novels examine both the attractions and contradictions of the British imperial world. Kaye died in Suffolk in 2004.