Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World, I'm Christian Gary Murphy and this is the

podcast in which we talked to extraordinary people about the big ideas and their lives

and the events that have helped shape them. We are on location in an independent bookshop

called The Book Bar in North London today because we're here to interview the winner of

the Murky Books New Writers Prize which is a competition set up with the prize really

of a book deal and the book is The Things We Lost by Jotie Patel which is already

being discussed as an extraordinary debut novel and Jotie is winning prizes and being listed

in lists of great writers and it must all be very exciting so welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. Now the Murky Books Prize is about bringing unheard

voices to the bookshelves. So what is it that is unheard about this story?

So the things that we lost follows a mother and son who are British Gujarati and growing

up I used to read all the time, I studied English at university and at school for A-levels

and I was never really able to pick up books that had characters who looked or sounded

like me. The books that I did discover from writers from the diaspora were later in my

life when I was in my mid-twenties and they were writers like Jim Belahiri or Avni Doshi,

writers who were Indian American and I couldn't really see many in the UK, specifically female

Indian writers, British Indian writers and specifically not Gujarati British writers.

And this story like I say follows a mother and son who are British Gujarati and it's

about their life and their family and the secrets within that family so I think in terms

of like the untold story it's very much a story about a British Gujarati family that

I hadn't seen on bookshelves growing up. And it flicks in time between the mother's

sort of young years and her son. Absolutely, yeah. And there are lots of sort of time references

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