Nikita Lalwani FRSL is a novelist born in Kota, Rajasthan and raised in Cardiff, Wales.^[1]

Her work has been translated into sixteen languages. She studied English at Bristol University.^[2]

Her first book, Gifted (2007), was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize^[3] and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award.^[4] Lalwani was nominated as Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year.^[5] In June 2008, she won the inaugural Desmond Elliott Prize for Fiction.^[6] She donated the £10,000 prize to human rights campaigners, Liberty.^[7]

Lalwani's second book, The Village, was published in 2012^[8] and was selected as one of eight titles for the Fiction Uncovered campaign for the best of British fiction in 2013.^[9]

Lalwani has contributed to The Guardian, the New Statesman and The Observer. She has also written for AIDS Sutra,^[10] an anthology exploring the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS in India.^[9]

In 2013, Lalwani was a book judge for the Orwell Prize.^[11] In 2018, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.^[9] She was later a judge for the Royal Society of Literature Encore Prize in 2019.^[12] In the same year, she contributed to the anthology Resist: Stories of Uprising.^[13][14] Her novel You People,^[15] set in a West London pizzeria where most of the staff are illegal immigrants, was published in 2020^[16] by Penguin and in 2021 by McSweeneys USA.^[17][18] Lalwani co-wrote^[19] episode 3 of The Outlaws with Stephen Merchant for BBC One/Amazon Studios,^[20] which was broadcast on BBC One on 8 November 2021.

She lives in North London.^[21]