Australia

Kavita Bedford

Photo © Christopher Woe

Kavita Bedford

Kavita Bedford is an Australian-Indian writer with a background in journalism, anthropology and literature. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, The Guardian and she was a recent Churchill Fellow exploring migrant narratives. She works and teaches in Sydney in media and global studies. Friends and Dark Shapes is her first novel.

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Latest reviews

“A tale of coexistence, kinship, and grief... Friends and Dark Shapes is a remarkable ethnographic fiction of what it means to be young, to live, and to have lost in Australia.”

— Queensland Literary Awards Shortlist, Aug 4 2021

“Kavita Bedford’s novel Friends and Dark Shapes explores the false promises and precarity of writing in the age of the gig economy.”

— The Nation, May 13 2021

“Bedford is a talented writer with a wonderful eye for detail, and her crisp, measured sentences are genuinely impressive. After grief, alienation and loneliness suffuse the novel, the story earns its way toward a sense of hope.”

— The New York Times Book Review, May 4 2021

“An intricately observed mosaic that comes together to represent a multi-faceted story of a Sydney that is forever evolving, in ways both positive and destructive.”

— In Daily, Apr 14 2021

“Bedford weaves a blanket of words that fans of complex literary fiction will fall into and savor.”

— Booklist, Apr 5 2021

“An intimate, epiphanic portrait of millennial city life.”

— The Guardian, Mar 4 2021