Jyoti Patel is an author living in London. Her debut novel, ‘‘The Things That We Lost’’ (to be published in January 2023) won the #Merky Books New Writers’ Prize in 2021, a competition launched by Stormzy and Penguin Random House UK to discover unpublished, underrepresented writers. She started writing it to “explore the social code switching people with mixed upbringings have to manage, and how that all plays out in practice.” We commissioned Jyoti to write a short story for WePresent’s Literally series: our slowly growing library of written pieces by some of the best writers in the world.
