Jyoti Patel with Nihal Arthanayake
Ask Penguin
Penguin Books UK
4.1 • 550 Ratings
🗓️ 3 May 2023
⏱️ 50 minutes
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Summary
This week on the Penguin Podcast, Nihal Arthanayake is joined by the second winner of Stormzy's Merky Books Prize, and she was also one of the Observer's best new novelists, it's Jyoti Patel.
Jyoti joins us to discuss her debut novel, The Things That We Lost, a story of family, loss and how far we go to protect those we love.
Also discussed on the podcast is the experience of mixing British and Gujarati cultures, the privilege of studying the arts, the importance of being your authentic self, the idea of the perfect sentence, and where it is that Jyoti feels the writer's life most intensely.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Brought to you by Penguin. |
| 0:04.9 | Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast where we talk to writers about writing. |
| 0:20.6 | I'm Nihal Athanaaniaka, and today I'm speaking |
| 0:22.7 | to Jorti Patel, the winner of the 2021 Murky Books New Writer Prize. Her debut novel, The Things |
| 0:29.6 | That We Lost, was published this year and tells the story of Nick, who whilst dealing with the |
| 0:34.4 | death of his grandfather, digs into his family's past to unlock secrets |
| 0:38.1 | about the father he never met. It has been chosen as one of the observers' best debut novels of |
| 0:43.8 | 2023 and has been variously described as deftly assured, a thoughtful meditation on family, |
| 0:50.5 | grief and the lengths will go to to protect the ones we love, and one of the best books |
| 0:55.4 | we've read this year. So I'm beyond delighted to have the opportunity to talk to her today. |
| 1:01.5 | Joti Patel, welcome to the Penguin podcast. Thank you so much, Nihal. It's such a joy to be here today. |
| 1:07.6 | It's great to have you here. When you hear these words deftly assured, a thoughtful meditation, one of the best |
| 1:16.5 | books we've read, do you automatically connect that with your own work? |
| 1:21.4 | Or do you kind of look over your shoulder and think, oh, oh, they're talking about me? |
| 1:25.3 | It's definitely the latter, and it's something that I'm trying to work on. Yeah, it takes a while for them to sink in. This quiet little book that I wrote thinking it was probably never going to be published or if so, it would be many years of trying and failing. So it just means a lot because I've always wanted to write, and I've always wanted to be an author. And with this story particularly, I feel like I took |
| 1:46.1 | a lot of risks that would not be conducive to such beautiful words being prescribed to it. So it makes it even |
| 1:53.5 | more special, I think, that I came from the heart. What were the risks you took? The story follows a |
| 1:59.0 | British Godratti family. And one of the conversations I had with my editor when we were sort of in the process of getting |
| 2:05.4 | it ready for publication was, you know, the fact that I choose to have, firstly, the vernacular |
| 2:11.6 | of like Northwest London slang of 18-year-old Nick when he's chatting to his friends |
| 2:16.1 | and when he's growing up, but also the |
| 2:18.0 | Godrati, I chose to include a lot of Godratti in the book. And I don't translate the Godrari, |
... |
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