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Chitra Ramaswamy
Chitra Ramaswamy is an award-winning author, journalist, and restaurant critic. Her last book, Homelands: The History of a Friendship (Canongate), about her friendship with a German Jewish refugee called Henry Wuga, won the Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was included in The Guardian’s top memoirs and biographies of 2022. Her first book, Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy (Saraband) won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award, was shortlisted for the Polari Prize, and was reissued in spring 2024.
She has contributed essays to Antlers of Water, Nasty Women, The Freedom Papers, The Bi:ble, and Message From The Skies and a book of micro-essays, Rich Things, for the Alasdair Gray Archive, that will be published in 2026. She is the restaurant critic for The Times Scotland and The Observer, a TV critic and writer for The Guardian, broadcasts for BBC radio, and is currently working on her next book.
She has extensive experience teaching memoir, non-fiction, essay-writing, journalism, and hybrid forms, chairing authors from Nicola Sturgeon to Zadie Smith, running workshops, giving talks, and visiting schools. She is from London and lives in Edinburgh.