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 self-published in 2018 and is 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 contributes short pieces to a fortnightly online publication of UKZN 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, is his most ambitious creative non-fiction project. Currently, the author is working on a novel with the tentative title: Imperfect Lives. Its theme is the challenges of friendships and family relationships in post-apartheid South Africa beyond the constraints of race and colour.