A. (AMBALAVANER) SIVANANDAN was born in 1923 and came to Britain from Sri Lanka in the wake of the race riots of 1958 - and walked straight into the riots of Notting Hill. Since then he wrote and lectured extensively on Black and Third World issues and published two collections of essays, A Different Hunger and Communities of Resistance. His novel When Memory Dies (1997) was winner of the 1998 Commonwealth Writers' Prize in the Best First Book category. Sivanandan was founder editor of the journal Race & Class and director of the Institute of Race Relations in London. He died in 2018.