Umi Sinha

Umi Sinha’s debut novel, Belonging (Myriad, 2015), was shortlisted for several awards, including the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award. Her second novel, The Fallen, is set in Italy and India during and after the Second World War. 

The experience of being an outsider looking for a place to belong, along with the impact of history – political and personal – on individual lives, is a major theme in her writing. 

Umi was born in the military hospital in Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1952 to an Indian father and English mother, both of whom spent the war in Britain. Her father was one of the first Indian officers in the Royal Indian Navy and served on the Arctic Convoys, her mother grew up in the Medway Towns, which were heavily bombed. Umi grew up in India in the decades following Independence, when there was deeply held resentment against the British and moved to Britain in 1968 during the backlash against the mass immigration of Asians who had been expelled from Uganda and Kenya. 

Umi has an MA in Creative Writing and taught at the University of Sussex for ten years and subsequently on the Creative Writing Programme at New Writing South. She is a founding member of The GuestHouse Storytellers, an oral storytelling club based in Newhaven, East Sussex. She teaches creative writing and offers mentoring and manuscript appraisal for writers through her Writing Clinic website. She is also a member of Writer’s Mosaic, a division of the Royal Literary Fund, and on the board of Writing Our Legacy, which enables Black, Asian and ethnically diverse people to tell their story through writing and the creative arts.

Please get in touch to discuss publishing rights for Umi Sinha.

Photo of Umi Sinha © India Stoughton