Nikita Lalwani was born in Rajasthan and raised in Cardiff. Her first novel GIFTED was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. It is currently being translated into 16 languages. In June 2008 Nikita Lalwani won the Desmond Elliot Prize for New Fiction, which she donated to human rights organisation Liberty. Her new novel THE VILLAGE will be published by Viking UK on 7 June 2012.

Lalwani is a tutor on the MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths University in London and also on the MA at Oxford University. She will be running a short course for the Guardian on the weekend of 31 March 2012.

Lalwani was writer-in-residence at UCL in London from 2007-2008. She has written for the Guardian and New Statesman, and contributed an essay to the non-fiction anthology AIDS SUTRA, published by Random House in 2009, exploring the human stories around the HIV epidemic in India.

Gifted was adapted for BBC Radio 4 as a drama for Woman’s Hour, which won the Best Radio Drama category in the Mental Health Media Awards 2008. In 2009 the Italian translation of Gifted won the Edoardo Kilhgren Caiparma prize for Foreign Literature.

In September 2008, Lalwani was interviewed on the BBC current affairs programme HARDtalk

A percentage of proceeds from the Indian versions of Gifted is given to the Dalit Foundation. You can support them by clicking here.

PRAISE FOR GIFTED:

‘Superb, brilliantly realised. The searing narrative is unflinchingly and tenderly written.’ (Independent )

‘Compelling, heart-wrenching and laced with redemptive hope . . . Touching and funny.’ (Observer )

‘Subtle, comic, heart-breaking, Lalwani’s first novel brims with insight on education and migration, but even more on parents and children. The climax, in Oxford, will stand comparison with Hardy’s Jude.’
( Independent on Sunday)

‘Pinpoints with genuine insight the bewilderment and anguish of a young woman marked out from her peers.’ (Sunday Times )

‘The novel’s triumph is in elucidating the hurt of both child and parents. Lalwani compellingly depicts the pain and pleasure of breaking the rules.’ (New Statesman )

‘Lalwani’s evocation of teenage dislocation is pitch-perfect and she inhabits her heroine’s interior world with tender authority.’ (Guardian )

Photo by Nishant Lalwani