Geordi Patel is the winner of 2021 Merky Books New Writer Prize. Her debut novel The Things That We Lost was published this year. It has been described as deftly assured, a thoughtful meditation on family grief and one of the best books we've read this year. Nihal Arthanika: Do you automatically connect that with your own work or do you kind of look over your shoulder and think, oh, oh, they're talking about me?
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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