KAVITA BEDFORD
I am an Australian-Indian author and
writer based in Sydney.
My first novel, Friends & Dark Shapes,
IS out Now.
"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
Friends &
Dark Shapes
A group of friends moves into a share house in Redfern. They are all on the cusp of thirty and big life changes, navigating insecure employment and housing, second-generation identity, online dating and social alienation—and one of them, our narrator, has just lost her father.
How do you inhabit a space where the landscape is shifting around you, when your sense of self is unravelling? What meaning does time have in the midst of grief?
REVIEWS FOR FRIENDS & DARK SHAPES
"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
“An intimate, epiphanic portrait of millennial city life...Bedford, filtering her Didionesque prose (and her protagonist’s Didionesque generational cataloguing) through a wider emotional lens, excels at.
Like Helen Garner and Christos Tsiolkas’ own debuts, Bedford’s is more concerned with taking the pulse of young, artistically-minded people alive and struggling through the city’s struggle, slipping and sinking through the every-nothing days of urban anomie and insecure work and relationships”
—The Guardian
“Bedford writes extraordinarily moving sentences and it's exciting to see this level of talent in a first novel”
—The Australian
“Astonishingly assured and full of razor sharp observations about what it means to live precariously in a changing city. It’s hard to believe this is Bedford’s first novel.”
—Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation and Weather
Interviews/Reviews
ABC Radio National: The Book Show (0:33:00)
ABC Radio Sydney: Drive (0:05:50)
2SER: Book Club podcast
2SER: Final Draft podcast
3CR: Published or Not
3RRR: Backstory (0:19:00)
ABC Radio National: The Bookshelf
Anonymous Was a Woman podcast
Booktopia podcast
Cass Moriarty
Guardian
Guardian (op-ed)
Guernica: The Daintree (fiction)
InDaily
James and Ashley Stay At Home podcast (0:02:40)
Kill Your Darlings
Largehearted Boy Playlist for Friends & Dark Shapes
LitHub: Redefining the Modern Flâneuse: A Reading List (op-ed)
Melbourne Writers Festival blog
Nation
New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Readings
Saturday Paper: How To Wait (short fiction)
SBS
Star Tribune
Sydney Morning Herald
ABOUT
I am a writer with a background working in journalism, anthropology and literature. I am the 2020/21 Westwords Writer in Residence at The Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. My writing has appeared in Guernica, The Guardian, Griffith Review amongst others, and I was 2018 Churchill Fellow exploring migrant narratives. I teach yoga and work in media and global studies in Sydney.
My first novel, Friends & Dark Shapes, was published in 2021 by Europa Editions (US), Text Publishing (AUS) and Edizioni E/O (Italy).
I am represented by Mary Krienke at Sterling Lord Literistic Agency, New York, USA.
PANELS & GUEST SPEAKING
I sometimes give talks to high school students and guest lecture to both undergraduate and postgraduate level students in anthropology, global studies and creative writing.
I have spoken on panels for The Commonwealth Secretariat UK ( Fiji), YouTube Creators for Change, The Sydney Writers Festival, State Government, National Young Writers Festival, Newtown Festival, The Walkley Foundation's Storyology conference.
AWARDS & GRANTS
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2020/21 Westwords Western Sydney Writer in Residence at The Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University, supported by Copyright Agency Limited
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2018 Churchill Fellowship in Europe
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2017 Writer Residency HANACC, Barcelona
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2016 Australia Council for the Arts Development Grant for writing residency at San Miguel Poetry Festival, and Under the Volcano Fiction Writing, Mexico
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2015 Walkley Foundation Women in Media Mentorship
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2015 Multicultural NSW Unity Grant
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2014 Scanlon Foundation GrantUnder 30 Western Sydney Writers’ Fellowship
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2013 Australia Council for the Arts Grant
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2013 Westwords Emerging Writers' Fellowship
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2012 Macquarie University Anthropology Department Prize for Ethnography
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2012 Editors' Choice prize in the University of New South Wales Tharunka, Non-Fiction Writing Competition
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2009 Winner of The Waverley Words Literary Festival Fiction Prize
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2007 The Charles Sturt Foundation, Ron Camplin Academic Major Scholarship for Contribution to Media
Photo credit: Christopher Woe
PROJECTS
My major themes of exploration dwell on place—drawing on how the organization of space and architecture are connected with the politics and lived experience of place and urban experience—and the perspective of the ‘outsider’ and migrant voices in literature.
MAPPING FRICTIONS: STORIES FROM WESTERN SYDNEY
Creative Producer for a storytelling project dedicated to celebrating stories from Western Sydney. These are people with diverse stories to tell. Despite this, sensationalist tales have dominated the media headlines have been of high crime rates, violence, and religious extremism.
Photo credit: George Voulgaropuolos
SHORT FICTION
GuERNICA, The WOLF
GUERNICA, THe daintree
the saturday paper, how to wait
ISLAND MAGAZINE, Riverine
NEW AUSTRALIAN FICTION 2022 KYD
GOing down swinging, mardi gras
Going down swinging, the meditations
griffith review, the spectator
ARTICLES
The Guardian, A love letter to sydney
lit hub, Redefining the Modern Flâneuse: A Reading List
ABC arts, Australian storytellers share favourite shows, books and films that are breaking new ground in terms of representation
the Guardian, The Modi Express: a modern spectacle, and an attempt to leave the leader's dark past behind
The Guardian, To prevent homegrown Islamist radicalism, drop the media hysteria
Roads & Kingdoms, Detained in Suburbia
Griffith Review, Smiling Faces of Integration
SELECTED WRITING
CONTACT
Thank you for visiting my site.
For publicity enquiries relating to Friends & Dark Shapes (AUS) please email my publicist Jane Watkins: Jane.Watkins[at]textpublishing.com.au
For publicity enquiries relating to Friends & Dark Shapes (USA) please email my publicist KRIsti bontrager: kristi[at]europaeditions.com
For general author enquiries please email my agent Mary Krienke at Sterling Lord Literistic: mary[at]sll.com
For all other enquiries and if you want me to write for you, please email me at: kavitabyds[at]gmail.com