Dr Kavita Bhanot

• Leverhulme ECR Fellowship (University of Leicester)
• PhD in Creative Writing and Literature (University of Manchester)  
• MA in Creative Writing (University of Warwick)
• MA in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (University of Warwick) 
• BA in Philosophy (University of Birmingham)

Dr. Kavita Bhanot published the influential essay Decolonise not Diversify in 2015. She has edited four collections of short stories and essays and translated a collection of short stories from Hindi. She completed a Leverhulme Research Fellowship at Leicester University (where she remains an Honorary Fellow), a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Ashoka University in Delhi and a Phd in Creative Writing and Literature at Manchester University. For the last twelve years, she has been a reader and mentor with The Literary Consultancy, with whom she has co-devised and co-delivers workshops on Ethical Editing.  In 2023 Kavita founded and directed Jaag:Panjabi and Pahari-Pothwari Language and Literature Festival in Handsworth, Birmingham as well as the Literature Must Fall Festival and Collective. She is currently writing a book for Pluto developing her work on Literature Must Fall.

• Creative Non-Fiction
• Creative Writing Foundation A & B
• Creative Writing Project
• Prose Writing

My PhD research was an analysis of a white gaze in the poetry, memoir and fiction of five British Asian writers of Punjabi origin.  This research had widened to a focus on how class, caste, race, religion, gender and nation manifest in Punjabi and English language literature. My work seeks to articulate a new paradigm for reading, writing, editing and translating literature that centres hierarchies – this is at the heart of the book I am writing: Literature Must Fall: Resisting Literary Supremacies, forthcoming from Pluto Press in 2024.