Balli Kaur Jaswal. Born in Singapore, with roots in Punjab, and raised in Japan, Russia, Australia, and the United States, Balli studied creative writing in the US and has received writing fellowships from the University of East Anglia and Nanyang Technological University.

Her fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in the UK's Sunday Express and in magazines such as Cosmopolitan, The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Conde Nast Traveller, and Best Australian Short Stories, among other publications.

Balli Kaur Jaswal is the author of the novel *The Legacy*, winner of the Sydney Morning Herald Young Australian Novelist of the Year Award in 2014. Its film adaptation was screened at the Singapore International Arts Festival in 2017.

Her second novel, *Sugarloaf*, was a finalist for the 2015 Epigram Books Fiction Prize and the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize.

Her third novel, *Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows*, was published in 2017 and garnered her a wider international following, boosted in part by its selection for Reese Witherspoon's online book club, *Hello Sunshine*. In 2019, *Business Times* described Jaswal as "Singapore's most internationally renowned novelist after Kevin Kwan of *Crazy Rich Asians*."