Dance Art Foundation | Artistic Director Joe Moran

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. Her most recent publication is an essay in the anthology Aids Sutra.

In June 2008 Nikita Lalwani won the Desmond Elliot Prize for New Fiction, which she donated to human rights organisation Liberty. She collaborated with poet and refugee Mir Mahfuz Ali to write a poem that was used as part of Liberty’s Charge or Release campaign and performed on The Verb for BBC Radio 3 as part of National Refugee Week.

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. Lalwani was writer-in-residence at UCL in London from 2007-2008. In September 2008, Lalwani was interviewed on the BBC current affairs programme HARDtalk.

‘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

For more information see www.nikitalalwani.com

Nikita Lalwani
Photography: Bucy Neech