Jamila Gavin

Jamila Gavin was born in Mussoorie, in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, during the final years of the British empire to an Indian father and an English mother who had met while teaching in Iran. Her family relocated to England after the Second World War. She first visited the country at the age of 6 and permanently settled by the time she was 11, completing her secondary schooling in London. She currently resides in Stroud, Gloucestershire.

A gifted pianist, she studied music, becoming a junior exhibitioner at Trinity College of Music and earning a scholarship to study in Paris. She worked in the BBC’s music department before turning to writing after the birth of her two children. It was through her experience as a mother that she became acutely aware of a gap in children’s literature where the experiences of multiracial children were often missing. This realization inspired her to create stories that mirrored the multicultural world she and her children lived in, enabling children from diverse ethnic backgrounds to see themselves represented in literature.

Gavin has written more than fifty novels, short story collections and plays for children and young adults. Her writing often draws on her own multicultural upbringing, particularly her early years in India, as seen in her acclaimed Surya Trilogy which poignantly explores partition. The first instalment in the series, The Wheel of Surya, was a runner-up for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award in 1992.

Her novel Grandpa Chatterji, a heartfelt comedic drama about a second-generation Indian family in the UK, was shortlisted for the Smarties Award and later adapted into a television series for Channel 4 Schools. However, it is Coram Boy (2000) that remains her most celebrated and best-known work. Winner of the Children’s Whitbread Award and shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, the novel was adapted for the stage, with successful runs at the Royal National Theatre and on Broadway.

Gavin has also written for television, radio and the stage. Her first original radio play, The God at the Gate, was broadcast on Radio 4, and she later adapted Coram Boy for Radio 4's Classic Serial in 2013. She also adapted her novel The Monkey in the Stars into a play for the Polka Theatre and created Just So, inspired by Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories.

She currently serves as patron of the Shakespeare Schools Festival, a charity that provides UK students the opportunity to perform Shakespeare in professional theatres.