Born in London to Sri Lankan parents and educated in the UK, where he graduated from Oxford University and UEA’s Creative Writing MA, Praveen Herat currently resides in Paris. But it was a three-year period living in Phnom Penh that marked him profoundly as a writer. There, he grasped that his experience as a first-generation immigrant and itinerant emigrant, navigating constantly between the center and the periphery, had profound parallels with a number of quintessential contemporary experiences. The key protagonists in his novel Between This World and the Next, published by Restless Books in early 2024, manifest this in different ways: through struggling with the complex legacy of their mixed-race heritage; through the experience of being exiled from wider society as a slave, and through being consumed by the lust for status and power in the lawless void that followed the fall of Soviet communism. During a ten-year period of researching and writing a book that charts the evolution of transnational crime across numerous locations, which include not only Cambodia but Ukraine, Dubai, and Liberia, he has pursued a diversity of professional opportunities, supporting victims of domestic abuse, project-managing museum events and working with young people as an academic coach. Thanks to the time and space he has been afforded by Millay Arts, he is currently on the verge of finishing his sophomore novel.