A Roll Of The Dice was a Non-Fiction finalist for The People’s Book Prize 2020! Mona Dash writes about her 10-year roller-coaster journey from India to England, after her first child is diagnosed with Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID). A story of loss, love, and hope in the face of genetic roulette – told with astounding courage and humour.

Read here for reviews of A Roll of the Dice and for details of where to purchase the book.

A Roll of the Dice was a finalist in the Non-Fiction category of the People’s Book Prize.

When did you know you had a story in you that you wanted to share?

Many years ago, when my baby boy became ill, and the word SCID entered my life, I thought, one day, I would write about it to increase awareness about this rare and fatal condition. I was however conscious that I needed to write it with a lot of care and integrity. It couldn’t be a hasty Facebook post or similar! Over the years, so much happened, which I won’t tell you here because it will give away the story but I remember, when my son was born in London, one friend said, ‘This story has all the trappings of a bestseller! You should write it.’

Even then, I hadn’t planned on writing a memoir because I’m a fiction writer and there are so many imaginary characters who want to be written about. It was only years later, as part of my course work for my Masters in Creative Writing, I wrote a short piece of life writing. I intended to send it to a journal, so was struggling to keep it within a word limit. But when we workshopped it, my tutor and classmates were insistent about me writing a full length memoir. ‘But why would anyone want to read a book about me?’ I remember asking. It was my friend, Alan Devey, another author, who replied, ‘Mona, let us be the judge of what we want to read.’ That was the point when I felt convinced that I had a story to share, and a book to write.

Read the full interview in The Asian Writer.

I am a writer of fiction and poetry. When I decided to write this as a memoir, and therefore a true story, there were questions, especially from family. Was it a good idea to bare so much of my personal life? Why not fictionalise it, invent characters, embellish the story?

There were two reasons I didn’t. One is that, as they say, truth is stranger than fiction. Critics would perhaps dismiss my story as improbable and unlikely to happen to one person! And the second, more pressing reason is that I really hope that this memoir – the only one written about SCID and other rare conditions such as PPROM – helps increase awareness of these medical conditions. I hope it makes someone else feel a little less alone. I hope it stresses the importance of new born screening for conditions such as SCID which, as of 2019, is mandatory in all states of America, but not yet in the UK where a pilot scheme is to be introduced this year. Professor Bobby Gaspar, who wrote the Introduction for this book, is leading a nation-wide trial for SCID screening.

Read more at BooksbyWomen.org.

The personal and the medical aspects of A Roll of the Dice: a story of loss, love and genetics (published on April 22 and available to order on Amazon).

2018 was an exciting year for author Mona Dash. She was on the shortlist for the SI Leeds Literary Prize 2018, for her short story collection, Let us look elsewhere. This was the only short story collection to make the shortlist. Apart from the excitement, making the SI Leeds shortlist meant various reading and networking opportunities. The six shortlisted writers were invited to read at the Rich Mix theatre in an event curated by Roopa Farooki; at the Asian Writer festival with Words of Colour Director Joy Francis; the Southbank Centre Literature festival in an event curated by publisher, editor and critic Ellah Allfrey; and finally in the Awards ceremony at Ilkley Literature festival with author, filmmaker and journalist Bidisha.

The prize provided an excellent platform for Mona to meet other authors and editors. This is good for anyone but especially made a difference to Mona, since later in the year, Linen Press UK, the only independent women’s publisher in the UK signed on her memoir A Roll of the Dice: a story of loss, love and genetics (published on April 22 and available to order on Amazon).

With a foreword by Professor Bobby Gaspar of Great Ormond street, a pioneer in gene therapy. A Roll of the Dice has been described by Linen Press, as a ‘thrilling page turner as well as a haunting journey towards motherhood’.

Read more at Peepal Tree Press.

Viewpoint invites authors to write about anything they want, as long as it’s of interest to readers of Asian Books Blog.

Here, Mona Dash talks about leaving her native India, to save her child’s life. Her son was born with a rare, genetically inheritable disease, SCID (severe combined immuno-deficiency). After his diagnosis, she set out for London so he could be given specialist treatment. She has written about her experiences in the memoir, A Roll of the Dice: a story of loss, love and genetics.

(Update – this published on Monday, April 22  and is now available to order on Amazon).

Mona still lives in London, where she combines motherhood, and work in the technology sector with writing fiction and poetry. Her work includes the novel Untamed Heart, and two collections of poetry, Dawn-drops and A certain way.  In 2016, Mona was awarded a poet of excellence award in the upper chamber of the British parliament, the House of Lords.  Her work has been widely praised and anthologized. In 2018, she won a competition established to encourage and promote British Asian writers, the Asian writer short story competition, for her short story Formations.

A Roll of the Dice describes the ups-and-downs, the shocks and support, the false starts and real hopes of a mother with a sick child. Mona humanizes the complexities of genetic medicine, and writes her story of genetic roulette without self-pity. Her memoir contains valuable information for couples facing infertility and complicated pregnancies, for parents of premature babies and of children with SCID.

So, over to Mona…

My baby boy was born several years ago in Kolkata, India. He was perfect; healthy, feeding well, big for his age, and even slept all through the night. As a young, career-oriented woman, fresh out of university and armed with an MBA, my worries were simple and pragmatic: how could I get back to my busy job which involved travelling across the globe?  How could I regain my pre-pregnancy weight? How could I get the best possible childcare for my baby?

Like most women, these were the practical challenges I expected to face and all I was really prepared for.

At four-and-a-half months of age, my son started becoming unwell with a high fever and an unexplained rash all over his little body. As young parents, we were not prepared for something like this. Indeed, who is? After repeated visits to our paediatrician who was clueless, we visited a string of doctors, each one more highly paid than the other, each one with longer waiting lists and a greater reputation. We ran from pillar to post, desperate to find out what could be wrong. After two whole months of playing tag with doctors, we decided to leave Kolkata and go to a specialist hospital in South India in search of a diagnosis.

Read more at Asian Books Blog.

1) Resonance: English Poetry from Poets of Odisha
Publisher: AuthorsPress India
Edited by Jaydeep Sarangi, Chittaranjan Misra and Mona Dash

2) The lie of the land: An Anthology of Indian poetry in English
Publisher: Sahitya Akademy India
Edited by Goutam Kermakar

May We Borrow Your Country is a contemporary collection of stories and poems that looks at dislocation and displacement with sympathy, tolerance and humour. It is peopled by courageous, poignant, eccentric individuals who cross borders, accommodate to new cultures and try to establish an identity in a new place. In the process, they encounter different versions of themselves, like reflections in a room of trick mirrors.

May We Borrow Your Country was launched in Waterstones Gower Street on the 26th of January 2019. More than a hundred tickets were sold, and bookings were actually stopped a couple of days before the event. Joining The Whole Kahani, on the panel were Lynn Michell, publisher, Linen Press, and Preti Taneja, author of We That Are Young. Preti has written the foreword to May We Borrow Your Country and had interesting questions for the writers. Lynn had her own questions, and it was an interactive audience who listened, asked questions, and cheered us. Rosie Beaumont-Thomas, the events manager concluded the event by mentioning Waterstones Gower Street will have to try hard to match the fantastic evening and huge turnout.

Manuscript shortlisted for the 2018 SI Leeds Literary Prize.

Read an extract here.