Winter Words Festival 2023

Friday 10 February

5-6pm

Join Chitra Ramaswamy to hear about her latest book, Homelands: The History of a Friendship , a work of creative non-fiction exploring her friendship with a 98-year-old German Jewish refugee called Henry Wuga.

Homelands won the Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was included in The Guardian’s top memoirs and biographies of 2022. This 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. It’s a story of migration, anti-Semitism, racism, family, belonging, grief and resilience. It’s about the past and the present, the state we’re in now and the ways in which we carry our pasts into our futures.

This book is about homelands.

Chitra Ramaswamy is a journalist and author.  Her first book, Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy, published by Saraband in April 2016, 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 is currently working on a commission by the Alasdair Gray Archive to make work in response to the archive. She writes for The Guardian, is the restaurant critic for The Times Scotland, and broadcasts for BBC radio. She lives in Edinburgh with her partner, two children and rescue dog.