Chitra Ramaswamy
Monday 29th July
Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh, 2 Blenheim Place, Edinburgh EH7 5JH
7pm
7.30pm
The Guardian praised it for its 'poetic language and references from Voltaire to Almodóvar', and The Scotsman called it a 'poetic and polemical book'. This summer, we're delighted to be joined by author and journalist Chitra Ramaswamy to hear all about her creative memoir Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy, a beautifully rendered account by a gay woman which updates the standard narrative of pregnancy and lifts it to another sphere.
Expecting
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.
About Chitra Ramaswamy
Chitra Ramaswamy is an author and journalist. Her latest book, Homelands: The History of a Friendship is a work of creative non-fiction exploring her friendship with a German Jewish refugee and Holocaust survivor called Henry Wuga. It 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 won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award, was shortlisted for the Polari Prize, and will be reissued 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 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.