Nikita Lalwani

Writer and Trustee of Liberty

Nikita Lalwani's first novel GIFTED was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2007, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. It has been 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.

 Lalwani was born in Rajasthan and raised in Cardiff. In 2013 she was a judge for the book section of the Orwell Prize, Britain's most prestigious prize for political writing. Lalwani appeared on the ITV panel show THE AGENDA with deputy prime minister Nick Clegg in 2014 and was previously interviewed on the BBC current affairs programme HARDtalk. She is a trustee of Liberty and also works with English PEN.

 Her second novel THE VILLAGE is published by Penguin in the UK, Penguin India, Flammarion in France, De Bezige Bij in Holland and Random House in the USA. In May 2013 it was one of eight novels awarded the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize for the best of British fiction. Set in a village modelled on a real-life open prison in India, THE VILLAGE is a gripping story about manipulation and personal morality, about how truly frail our moral judgement can be.

 Nikita has written regularly for the UK 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.

http://www.nikitalalwani.com/