Bala Mudaly is an Indian South African, born in Durban in 1938. Chronic job insecurity and political harassment compelled him to migrate to Australia in 1988 with his wife. He retired as a clinical psychologist from Monash Health in Melbourne in Dec 2018 at the age of 80. His debut collection of poems and short stories set in Australia, Colours of Hope and Despair, was launched in 2018 and still available on Kindle. He has also had a short story, Self-Inflected Pain of the Writer’s Kind, published in the Victorian Writer, a quarterly writers’ magazine. The author has contributed short pieces to a fortnightly online publication of the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban, the Creative Network Magazine. As an amateur writer, he has workshopped almost all his creative writings in a Writers Group sponsored by the City of Monash public library service. His memoir, Colour-Coated Identity, was his most ambitious creative non-fiction project published in 2021. Currently, the author is working on a novel with the tentative title: Nothing’s For Sure. Its theme is the challenges of friendships and family relationships in post-apartheid South Africa beyond the constraints of race and colour.
