About Umi

Umi Sinha was born in India and spent the first ten years of her life on a remote naval engineering base in the Western Ghats. She moved to Britain with her mother and siblings at the age of fifteen. Her mother, born in Kent, was a writer and an artist. Her father was one of the first Indians to be accepted as an officer in the Royal Indian Navy and served on the Arctic Convoys in the Second World War.

Her short stories have been published in magazines and anthologies. She has an MA in Creative Writing and taught on the Certificate in Creative Writing at Sussex University for ten years. She has also worked as a Lecturer in Creative Writing on the MA at Brighton University and currently teaches on the Creative Writing Programme at New Writing South. She also runs her own courses and workshops, mentors other writers, and offers manuscript appraisal and editing support, and resources for writers at her Writing Clinic. Belonging is her first novel.

Umi is also a performance storyteller. In 2006 she and a group of other storytellers founded The GuestHouse Storytellers, an oral storytelling club based in Newhaven, East Sussex.