Nikita Lalwani
Indian-born Welsh writer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nikita Lalwani FRSL is an Indian-born Welsh novelist. She was born in Kota, Rajasthan, and raised in Cardiff, Wales.[1] Her work has been translated into sixteen languages.
Career
She studied English at University of Bristol.[2]
Her first book, Gifted (2007), was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize[3] and shortlisted for the Costa Book Award for First Novel.[4] Lalwani was nominated as Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year.[5] In June 2008, she won the inaugural Desmond Elliott Prize.[6] She donated the £10,000 prize to Liberty, a human rights advocacy nonprofit.[7]
Lalwani's second book, The Village, was published in 2012[8] and was selected as one of eight titles for the Fiction Uncovered Prize 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 Award 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 by Penguin[16] and in 2021 by McSweeney's USA.[17][18]
Lalwani co-wrote three episodes of the BBC One/Amazon Studios series The Outlaws, including two episodes with Stephen Merchant and one with Jess Bray.[19]
She also wrote the screenplay for the romantic comedy Picture This for Amazon Studios,[20] starring Simone Ashley, and wrote an episode of crime thriller Under Salt Marsh for Sky Studios.[21]
Selected works
Novels
- Gifted (2007)
- The Village (2012)
- You People (2020)
Film
- Picture This (2025) Screenplay Amazon Studios
Television
- Under Salt Marsh Series 1, Episode 4, Writer 2025 forthcoming
- The Outlaws S1E3 (2021) BBC/Amazon Studios
Written by Stephen Merchant and Nikita Lalwani
- The Outlaws 2022 S2E3 (2022) BBC/Amazon Studios
Written by Stephen Merchant and Nikita Lalwani
- The Outlaws 2024 S3E3 (2024) BBC/Amazon Studios