Chitra Ramaswamy – författare

THE SALTIRE'S NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEARA GUARDIAN'S BEST MEMOIR AND BIOGRAPHY OF 2022 'Remarkable' The Times'Achingly beautiful' GuardianBeautiful in unusual and wonderful ways' Rebecca SolnitThis book is about two unlikely friends. One born in 1970s Britain to Indian immigrant parents, the other arrived from Nazi Germany in 1939, fleeing persecution.This is a story of migration, racism, family, belonging, grief and resilience. It is about the state we're in now and the ways in which we carry our pasts into our futures.

“A cartoon fried egg. An eye. The tiniest of black holes. It needed a professional eye to be seen, but once pointed out it was undeniable. My own little Big Bang. The beginning of it all.”When Chitra Ramaswamy discovered she was pregnant, she longed to read something that went above and beyond a biology book or prescriptive manual; something that, instead, got to the heart of this thrilling, bewildering, overlooked, and often misrepresented experience.Expecting is a creative memoir. Through nine chapters exploring the nine months of pregnancy and birth, Ramaswamy takes the reader on a physical, intellectual, emotional, literary, and philosophical journey through the landscape of pregnancy. Childbearing and childbirth are experiences defined both by the measurable monthly changes to one’s life and body, and by those immeasurable, often obscured and neglected changes in perspective which are accessed through metaphor, art, and emotion.Ramaswamy bears witness to the individual and collective experience of pregnancy in this intimate yet expansive book of wild and lyrical essays, paying tribute to this most extraordinary and ordinary of experiences.