Nikita Lalwani

Nikita Lalwani 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, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize[3] and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award.[4] Lalwani was also nominated as Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year.[5] In June 2008, Lalwani 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 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 and also written for AIDS Sutra,[10] an anthology exploring the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS in India.[9]

She lives in North London.[11] In 2013, Lalwani was a book judge for the Orwell Prize.[12] 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.[13] In the same year, she contributed to the anthology Resist: Stories of Uprising].[14][15] Her novel You People, set in a West London pizzeria where most of the staff are illegal immigrants, was published in 2020.[16]