Nikita Lalwani FRSL is a novelist born in Kota, Rajasthan and raised in Cardiff, Wales. [1]
Her work has been translated into sixteen languages. She studied English at Bristol University. [2]
Her first book, Gifted (2007), was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize [3] and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. [4] Lalwani was nominated as Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. [5] In June 2008, she won the inaugural Desmond Elliott Prize for Fiction. [6] She donated the £10,000 prize to human rights campaigners, Liberty. [7]
Lalwani's second book, The Village, was published in 2012 [8] and was selected as one of eight titles for the Fiction Uncovered campaign for the best of British fiction in 2013. [9]
Lalwani has contributed to The Guardian, the New Statesman and The Observer. She has also written for AIDS Sutra, [10] an anthology exploring the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS in India. [9]
In 2013, Lalwani was a book judge for the Orwell Prize. [11] In 2018, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. [9] She was later a judge for the Royal Society of Literature Encore Prize in 2019. [12] In the same year, she contributed to the anthology Resist: Stories of Uprising. [13] [14] Her novel You People, [15] set in a West London pizzeria where most of the staff are illegal immigrants, was published in 2020 [16] by Penguin and in 2021 by McSweeneys USA. [17] [18] Lalwani co-wrote [19] episode 3 of The Outlaws with Stephen Merchant for BBC One/Amazon Studios, [20] which was broadcast on BBC One on 8 November 2021.
She lives in North London. [21]