I craft sentences in the shower and sniff books and imagine inflicting terror on signs with grammatical errors. I’m a writer.

I’m also human, and sometimes cheat on my calling. My occupations have been as varied as the stamps in my passport: journalist in Chicago, education consultant in Abu Dhabi, editor in London, marketing manager in Hong Kong. Across many paths of inquiry, it was human nature I found most compelling. But even an MPhil in psychology from the University of Cambridge could not satisfy the demands of such a curiosity.

Born to Gujarati parents who found their way to the United Arab Emirates via Kampala, Surat, Pondicherry and Colchester, movement seemed inevitable, in geography and in thought. I found myself constantly pulled towards the taboo, the unconventional, the provocative. I founded South Asian Parent, a platform for people who keep versions of themselves in the dark. I’m scared of the dark.

I write to expand. Much of my storytelling is around family and culture. But what I’m really doing is borrowing the essence of things to find a new way of thinking about old pursuits — how we love, what we impart, the style of our sadness, the validity of our values; what we count as evidence of happiness, what we build as immunity to change, and above all, the authenticity of our actions.

My words are my adventure into inner and outer space, places I wish we went to more often.

Come with.

 

If you are looking for a more traditional bio:

Uttama Kirit Patel is a writer, editor, and author of the novel Shape of an Apostrophe (Serpent’s Tail, 2025) whose work has been featured in The Tribune, Vogue, BBC, LitHub, Times of India and Wasafiri, among others. She holds an MPhil in Psychology from the University of Cambridge, has been a semi-finalist in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, and was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Uttama is the founder of South Asian Parent magazine, an adoptive mother, and a writer who brings a psychologically-informed approach to narrative revision and craft. Find her on Instagram @uttama