Nikita Lalwani

b. 1973

Nikita Lalwani was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.

Nikita Lalwani‘s work has been translated into sixteen languages. Her first novel, Gifted – the story of a child prodigy of Indian origin growing up in Wales – was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and won the inaugural Desmond Elliott Prize for Fiction. Her second, The Village, was modelled on a real-life ‘prison village’ in northern India, and won a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. Her third novel You People (2020), follows Tuli (the proprietor of an Italian restaurant) and his employee Shan who, having fled the Sri Lankan civil war, is desperate to find his family.

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