Jyoti Patel is an author and winner of the 2021 #Merky Books New Writers’ Prize. Her debut novel "The Things That We Lost" is out now.
An extract of "The Things That We Lost" 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submission from over 2,000 entries for the 2021 #Merky Books New Writers’ Prize, a competition that aims to discover unpublished, underrepresented writers aged 16-30 from the UK and Ireland.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 panel of judges included #Merky Books founder Stormzy, Candice Brathwaite, Emma Dabiri, Guz Khan, and Katarina Johnson-Thompson.
Jyoti is a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing Prose Fiction MA and was selected as one of "The Observer’s 10 Best New Novelists for 2023". 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.