Chitra Ramaswamy
Chitra Ramaswamy is an author and journalist. Her 2022 book, Homelands: The History of a Friendship (Canongate) is a work of creative non-fiction exploring her friendship with a German Jewish refugee and Holocaust survivor called Henry Wuga. It won the Non-Fiction Book of the Year at Scotland’s National Book Awards 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 First Book of the Year Award at Scotland’s National Book Awards, was shortlisted for the Polari Prize, and was reissued with a new introduction in spring 2024. She has contributed essays to Antlers of Water, Nasty Women, The Freedom Papers, The Bi:ble, and Message From The Skies and produced a book of micro-essays, Rich Things, for the Alasdair Gray Archive. She writes for The Guardian, is the restaurant critic for The Times Scotland, broadcasts for BBC radio, and is currently working on her third book. She is from London and lives in Edinburgh.
Expecting
“A cartoon fried egg. An eye. The tiniest of black holes. It needed a professional eye to be seen, but once pointed out it was undeniable. My own little Big Bang. The beginning of it all.”
When Chitra Ramaswamy discovered she was pregnant, she longed to read something that went above and beyond a biology book or prescriptive manual; something that, instead, got to the heart of this thrilling, bewildering, overlooked, and often misrepresented experience.
Expecting is a creative memoir. Through nine chapters exploring the nine months of pregnancy and birth, Ramaswamy takes the reader on a physical, intellectual, emotional, literary, and philosophical journey through the landscape of pregnancy. Childbearing and childbirth are experiences defined both by the measurable monthly changes to one’s life and body, and by those immeasurable, often obscured and neglected changes in perspective which are accessed through metaphor, art, and emotion.
Ramaswamy bears witness to the individual and collective experience of pregnancy in this intimate yet expansive book of wild and lyrical essays, paying tribute to this most extraordinary and ordinary of experiences.
