Balli Kaur Jaswal was born in Singapore and grew up in Japan, Russia and the Philippines. She studied Creative Writing at Hollins University in the US and was awarded the David TK Wong Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia.  Her first novel Inheritance was published by Sleepers Publishing in Australia in 2013 (where Balli lived for some years) and won the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelist award. In 2014, she was the National Writer-In-Residence at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

In 2017 Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows was published by Harper Fiction in the UK and William Morrow in the US, where it was chosen for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club. The novel has been an international bestseller, selling in twenty territories, and film rights have been optioned. The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters followed in 2019, and has also been optioned for television. Balli’s latest novel Now You See Us is about a group of Filipina domestic workers and was published in 2023.

Reviews:

‘Big-hearted, earthy and funny: turns so many preconceptions upside down. A rattlingly good story’ – Deborah Moggach, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

‘Warm and hilariously funny’ – Good Housekeeping

‘Charming, hilarious and thoughtful’ – The Pool

‘Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows balances darkness and light, social commentary and ecstatic escapism. . . funny and moving tale of desire and its discontents’ – The Economist

‘Sensual, authentic and hilarious, I will never look at an aubergine in the same way again – 5 stars’ – The Sun

‘A dark comedy. . . about empowerment and friendship’ – Tatler

‘A page turner. . . Tackles serious themes with a light and funny touch’ – Glamour

‘By turns erotic, romantic, and mysterious, this tale of women defying patriarchal strictures enchants’ – Kirkus Reviews