Uttama Kirit Patel is a writer, editor, adoptive mother, and author of the novel Shape of an Apostrophe. She holds an MPhil in Psychology from the University of Cambridge, and her work has been featured in The Tribune, Vogue, BBC, LitHub, Times of India and Wasafiri, among others. Uttama is the founder of South Asian Parent magazine, has been a semi-finalist in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, and was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She spent her childhood in Abu Dhabi and has since lived in over a dozen cities, seeking to provoke the ordinary through storytelling.