Jutty has a very battered copy of the Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. The book made her think seriously about what it would be like to be an author. It's so well loved and so dog-a-eared every time I walk past it on my bookshelf. Jutty: "I can see 15, 16 year old me trying so hard to understand it"
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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