Susmita has been a professional writer and teacher since 2005. She won the Winchester Writers’ Festival Memoir Prize in 2016 and her novel The Normal State of Mind (Parthian/Bee Books) was longlisted for the Words to Screen Prize at the Mumbai Association of Moving Images (MAMI) festival in India. She has been shortlisted for, and won, numerous prizes and awards and her work has been commissioned by magazines and for BBC Radio 4. Her most recent collection of short stories, Table Manners, was published by Dahlia Books (2018). It won the Saboteur Short Story Collection Prize in 2019, was finalist for the DLF Hall & Woodhouse Literary Prize and will be serialised for BBC Radio 4 Extra in January 2020. Currently, she is working on her second novel.

She teaches Contemporary Fiction on the Masters Programme at Winchester University,
facilitates writing for young people at the Mayflower Young Writers workshops (an ACE
funded ArtfulScribe project), and is a mentor supporting BAME writers for the Middle
Way Mentoring project. She also leads workshops at festivals, guest lectures at
universities and has judged many short story competitions.