Chitra Ramaswamy

Chitra Ramaswamy is a writer, journalist, and critic. Homelands (Canongate), a book about her friendship with a German Jewish refugee called Henry Wuga, won the Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year 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 Saltire First Book of the Year Award, was shortlisted for the Polari Prize, and was reissued in spring 2024. She has contributed essays to a number of collections and judged literary prizes including the Baillie Gifford prize for Non-Fiction, the Gordon Burn Prize, and the Desmond Elliot. Her latest book, a collection of micro-essays called Rich Things for the Alasdair Gray Archive, was published in spring 2026. She is the restaurant critic for The Times Scotland, for which she has won Food and Drink Writer of the Year at the Scottish Press Awards for four consecutive years and been shortlisted twice for Restaurant Writer of the Year at the Guild of Food Writers. She is also an occasional restaurant critic for The Observer, a TV critic and writer for The Guardian, and a regular contributor to Writers Mosaic, a division of the Royal Literary Fund. She is from London and lives in Leith, Edinburgh.