Mulaika Hijjas has published short fiction in literary journals in the United States, Malaysia and Hong Kong.  After leaving university she spent two years working full time on a collection of short stories, before doing a PhD on nineteenth-century Malay poetry by women at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).  Her book based on this thesis, Victorious Wives, was published in 2011 by the National University of Singapore Press. She is from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but now lives on the Isle of Dogs in London.  She is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at SOAS, where she teaches Indonesian and Malay literature and cultural studies.  While at the University of East Anglia, she worked on a novel set in contemporary Jakarta, about an expatriate English family and their Indonesian servants.