Kavita Puri is a British journalist, radio broadcaster, and author. Her 2019 book, Partition Voices: Untold British Stories, is based on her award-winning BBC Radio 4 documentary series of the same name.
She appeared on the podcast The Literary City with Ramjee Chandran to discuss her book, Partition Voices. In 2024 Kavita Puri presented a BBC radio 4 series called Three Million about the 1943 Bengal famine.
Puri studied law at St Catharine's College at the University of Cambridge, graduating in 1995.[1] [2]
Puri has worked on BBC Newsnight as a political producer, film producer and assistant editor, and as the editor of Our World, a foreign affairs documentary programme.[3] Her 2014 BBC Radio 4 series, Three Pounds in My Pocket,[4] told the stories of South Asians who migrated to post-war Britain. In 2015, Puri was named Journalist of the Year by the Asian Media Awards.[5]
In Partition Voices, a three-part series produced for BBC Radio 4 in 2017, Puri documented the stories of Colonial British and British Asians who lived through the 1947 Partition of India.[6] [7] Partition Voices won the Royal Historical Society's Radio and Podcast Award and its overall Public History Prize. In 2019, she published a book, Partition Voices: Untold British Stories, based on the series.[8] In Literary Review, John Keay described the book as "the closest thing to a partition memorial currently on offer," and a "heartfelt and beautifully judged book".
In 2018, then-Prime Minister Theresa May appointed Puri as a trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum for a period of four years.