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Biography
Kavita Puri is a multi award-winning journalist, executive producer and broadcaster. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed book “Partition Voices: Untold British Stories” which was adapted for the stage as “Silence” at the Donmar Warehouse in London and has toured England.
Kavita has created, presented and written landmark radio series on BBC Radio 4 and The World Service. The recent BBC podcast Three Million won Gold for Best New Podcast at the British Podcast Awards 2024, Best Radio Programme at the Broadcast Press Guild Awards, Best History Series at the Association of International Broadcasters, and Best Presenter at the Eastern Eye Arts and Culture Awards. Kavita was also a finalist for the Orwell Journalism Prize. It was a podcast of the year in the Times and Guardian. She devised and presented Partition Voices which was awarded the Royal Historical Society’s Best Radio and Podcast Prize and its overall Public History Prize. The award-winning Three Pounds in My Pocket which she created and hosts, is the first social history of British South Asians and is currently on its fifth series on BBC Radio 4. The Radio Times has described Kavita as “our foremost chronicler of the lives of British South Asians.” She has lectured and spoken on the subject around the world, and has written for publications including the Guardian, Observer, Times and Evening Standard. Kavita was also a regular presenter of the weekly affairs programme The Inquiry.
Kavita has worked at the BBC in senior editorial positions on its flagship current affairs programmes including Newsnight and Panorama, covering politics, investigations and foreign affairs. As editor of the foreign documentary series Our World, she commissioned and oversaw its coverage of the war in Yemen which won numerous awards including from the Royal Television Society and the Foreign Press Association.
She is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum where she chairs the V & A East Committee which is overseeing the opening of the Storehouse and the Museum at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford. Kavita was the Chair of the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2025.
Partition Voices: Untold British Stories
Dotted across homes in Britain are people who were witnesses to one of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. Yet their memory of India’s partition has been shrouded in silence. Kavita Puri’s father was twelve when he found himself one of the millions of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims caught up in the devastating aftermath of a hastily drawn border. For seventy years he remained silent – like so many – about the horrors he had seen. When her father finally spoke out, opening up a forgotten part of Puri’s family history, she was compelled to seek out the stories of South Asians who were once subjects of the British Raj, and are now British citizens. Determined to preserve these accounts – of the end of Empire and the difficult birth of two nations – here Puri records a series of remarkable first-hand testimonies, as well as those of their children and grandchildren whose lives are shaped by partition’s legacy. With empathy, nuance and humanity, Puri weaves a breathtaking tapestry of human experience over a period of seven decades that trembles with life; an epic of ruptured families and friendships, extraordinary journeys and daring rescue missions that reverberates with pain, loss and compassion. The division of the Indian subcontinent happened far away, but it is also a very British story. Many of those affected by partition are now part of the fabric of British contemporary life, but their lives continue to be touched by this traumatic event. Partition Voices breaks the silence and confronts the difficult truths at the heart of Britain’s shared history with South Asia.
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