Bem Le Hunte

At the age of 25, she moved to Australia and, within a few weeks, was lecturing full-time in the Humanities Department of Sydney University. Her first novel, The Seduction of Silence, published in 2001, unfolds the story of an Indian family and the monumental changes it undergoes through love and loss over a period of a hundred years. The book's prose was described by Geraldine Brooks as "vivid and arresting" and by Thomas Keneally as "ample and fascinating". The book, published by HarperCollins in U.S. and Australia and by Penguin Group in India, achieved wide success and was shortlisted for the 2001 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. It was translated into Polish under the title Kuszące Wołanie Ciszy and published by Kameleon. In 2006, her second novel, There, Where the Pepper Grows, a tale about a Polish-Jewish family which disembarks in Kolkata while en route to Palestine during World War II, was published internationally by HarperCollins. Her third novel, Elephants with Headlights, was published in March 2020.

Bem Le Hunte (born 1964) is a British-Indian-Australian author whose internationally published novels, The Seduction of Silence (2001) and There, Where the Pepper Grows (2006) have gained her numerous positive reviews and a wide, appreciative readership in the Eastern and the Western world. Her first novel was shortlisted for the 2001 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.