Janet H Swinney

Janet was born and grew up in a mining area in the North East of England and was the first member of her family to go to university. She got her political education in Scotland where she lived and worked for thirteen years and now lives in London where she has lived and worked for considerably longer. She shared her life for forty-five years with the Indian-born composer, Naresh Sohal. Her longstanding connections with India have deeply influenced her writing. She worked for many years in post-16 education, ultimately as a government inspector. During this period, she produced a wide range of teaching and training materials, often commissioned by government departments. She also wrote features articles for national newspapers and journals including Observer Scotland, The Times and The Guardian. In 2008, she was a runner-up in The Guardian’s International Development Journalism competition in the professional class. From 2009, she turned her attention exclusively to fiction. Since then, her stories have appeared in print anthologies and online journals across the UK, India and America. Earlyworks Press have published much of her work in the UK, while in India, it has appeared in a number of online literary journals, including the Bombay Review, Out of Print and the Lakeside International Review of Literature and Arts as well as in the academic journal Postcolonial Text. Her story The Map of Bihar was nominated for the Eric Hoffer prize for prose 2012 and was published in Best New Writing 2013 (USA). In 2014 she was a runner-up for the London Short Story Prize. She has had work listed in many competitions. Her story The House with Two Letter-Boxes was longlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2019. In 2020 she was a guest of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in Mumbai, with a specific remit to talk about India as seen through the lens of the short story. Her first collection of short fiction, The Map of Bihar and Other Stories, was published in 2019 by Circaidy Gregory Press and was well reviewed by the Irish Times. She has just completed her second collection, from which Foxtrot in Fulham is the title story, and a play based on the short stories and vignettes of Saadat Hasan Manto.