Cinnamon: A History of Taste and Empire

Nira Wickramasinghe is a historian of the Indian Ocean world and university professor. Her recent books include the award-winning Slave in a Palanquin, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age, Metallic Modern, and Dressing the Colonised Body. She is the recipient of a number of fellowships – from the Institute for Advanced Study, the Davis Center at Princeton, and from the British Academy – and has spent time in New York as a Fulbright Hayes fellow. She grew up in Paris and studied at Oxford where she received her PhD in history. She now works and lives in Leiden with her younger son, travelling frequently to Sri Lanka, the land of her birth. Her latest non-fiction work, Cinnamon: A History of Taste and Empire, is due out in 2026.

Actor, voiceover and audiobook narrator Rita Sharma started her career with the Royal Court Young Peoples Theatre. Her voice work includes the narration for a number of audiobooks, as well as TV documentaries, dubbing work for the BBC and National Geographic, and TV and radio commercials. She also voices in Hindi as well as in Punjabi. Her most recent audiobook narrations include Cinnamon: A History of Taste and Empire by Nira Wickramasinghe.