I feel like I have a lot of those values and traditions in me in ways that I don't I'm not even aware of really. It's only when I come back and I think about it and I feel like certainly something that's very Indian about me and that I perform very much is the Gujarati language but also the food element. Have you ever questioned how Asian you are or am I being too thisy here? No you're 100% on the money with that and that's actually where this whole novel came from. You know I wanted to explore that that feeling through a fictional lens of these two characters one growing up in 70s and 80s and then one who we meet
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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