

Jyoti Patel is a graduate of the Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) MA at the University of East Anglia (UEA). She also has a BA in English Literature with Creative Writing from UEA. Her writing has previously been published as part of We Present’s ‘Literally’ series and in the anthology for the 2022 Bristol Short Story Prize, for which she was shortlisted.
Her debut novel, The Things That We Lost, is told from the perspectives of 18-year-old Nik and his mother Avani, flitting between the past and present as Nik searches for answers surrounding the circumstances of his father’s death.
An extract of the novel was chosen as the winning submission from over 2,000 entries for the 2021 #Merky Books New Writers’ Prize, a competition that aims to discover unpublished, underrepresented writers aged 16-30 from the UK and Ireland. The novel will be published by #Merky Books at Penguin Random House UK in January 2023.