Kavita A. Jindal is an award-winning novelist, poet and essayist. Her novel Manual For A Decent Life won the Eastern Eye Award for Literature, 2020. The book was shortlisted for The Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize, 2021-22, and as an unpublished manuscript it won the Brighthorse Prize in 2018.  She has published two poetry collections to critical acclaim: Patina and Raincheck Renewed. Reviewers have said of her recent writing: “witty and wry, with a steely heart” and of the novel: “the book’s boldness, beauty and courage are utterly seductive.”

Her work has appeared in anthologies and literary journals worldwide and been broadcast on BBC Radio, Zee TV and European radio stations. She has contributed fiction, non-fiction and poetry to more than thirty anthologies published variously in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, India, Hong Kong, Germany and Romania. She has been invited to run writing workshops at schools and colleges; including at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich; at the University of Bucharest; and for the National Trust and LSE in the UK. She was a judge for the ‘Richmond Young Writers’ Award’ in 2016, 2017 and 2019. She has participated in literary festivals in the UK and the US, and also in Hong Kong, Germany, India and Ukraine. Selected poems have been translated into Arabic, German, Punjabi, Spanish, Romanian and Italian.

Her poem Kabariwala is included in 100 Great Indian Poems published by Bloomsbury in 2018. Her poem Act of Faith is included in the anthology ‘Unseen’ which is in the UK GCSE and A Levels syllabus.

She was Senior Editor at Asia Literary Review and she is co-founder of The Whole Kahani collective of British Asian writers, which has published two anthologies. In 2021 she was elected to serve on the Poetry and Spoken Word committee of the Society of Authors. She is an editor for The Writing Salon anthology Volume 2.

Kavita enjoys collaborating with musicians, artists and film-makers across a range of projects such as Film:Poems and Visual Arts exhibitions that incorporate text. There are links to many of these projects on this website.