Chitra Ramaswamy is a journalist and author. Her latest book, Homelands: The History of a Friendship (Canongate) is a work of creative non-fiction exploring her friendship with a 99-year-old German Jewish refugee called Henry Wuga. It won the Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was included in The Guardian’s top memoirs and biographies of 2022. Her first book, Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy (Saraband) won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize. She has contributed essays to Antlers of Water, Nasty Women, The Freedom Papers, The Bi:ble and Message From The Skies and recently completed a commission from the Alasdair Gray Archive. She writes for The Guardian, is the restaurant critic for The Times Scotland, and broadcasts for BBC radio. She is from London and lives in Edinburgh with her partner, two children, and rescue dog.
A book about history, friendship, family and what it means to belong, from the award-winning journalist
“Our sense of home explored through the story of a journalist’s friendship with a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor… It is a cliché to describe a book as achingly beautiful, but those are the words I reach for: Homelands is both beautiful and, at times, left me with an ache I struggled to name.”
Aamna Mohdin
Guardian