In her stunning debut novel, Nikita Lalwani pits a parent’s dream against a child’s, exploring how much can be endured in the name of love
Nikita Lalwani
Nikita Lalwani credits a book by another Booker Prize shortlistee, Gerard Woodward’s I’ll Go to Bed at Noon (2004), as the novel that shifted her own view on what fiction could be
Lalwani was born in Rajasthan in India, raised in Cardiff and studied at Bristol University. Woodward was her MA creative writing tutor and his novel showed her ‘how dysfunction can be simultaneously comic and brutal’. Although, as a writer, she craves ‘solitude without self-doubt’, she is also ‘a bad but enthusiastic DJ’. Not all her writing is funnelled into novels; she was the co-writer, with her friend Stephen Merchant, of an episode of his television comedy crime caper Outlaws.