The identity of the characters and the nuance of being British Geordi Kenyan has always been there throughout. I think it definitely happened simultaneously for me to create sort of an authentic family and an authentic story their identity needed to be very much on the page from the beginning. What about your own connection to India because it's almost a connection that's interrupted by Africa? Yeah it's a very interesting question actually because my family as far as I know we don't really have any close family or friends in Gujarat. We have some distant family I would know their names but for me my experience of India was more so of Bangalore which is in the south. And what if the distance that Avani feels
This week on the Penguin Podcast, Nihal Arthanayake is joined by the second winner of Stormzy's Merky Books Prize, and she was also one of the Observer's best new novelists, it's Jyoti Patel.
Jyoti joins us to discuss her debut novel, The Things That We Lost, a story of family, loss and how far we go to protect those we love.
Also discussed on the podcast is the experience of mixing British and Gujarati cultures, the privilege of studying the arts, the importance of being your authentic self, the idea of the perfect sentence, and where it is that Jyoti feels the writer's life most intensely.
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