Bidisha

Bidisha Mamata (born 29 July 1978) is a British broadcaster and presenter specialising in international affairs and human rights, political analysis, the arts and culture. She is also a multimedia artist making films and stills.

Bidisha
Born	Bidisha Mamata (1978-07-29) 29 July 1978 (age 45) London, England, UK
Occupation	Writer, broadcaster, journalist, film-maker, photographer
Education	Oxford University
Alma mater	St Edmund Hall, Oxford University London School of Economics Haberdashers' Aske's School for Girls
Period	1993–present

Bidisha began writing professionally for style magazines such as i-D, Dazed and Confused, and the NME, at the age of 14, and published her first novel at 18.^[1] She writes for The Guardian and The Observer^[2] and works as a TV and radio presenter for the BBC, presenting programmes including Woman's Hour.

She also does outreach work in UK detention centres and prisons, in affiliation with literary and human rights organisation English PEN.

Early life and education

Bidisha was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's School for Girls, an independent school in Elstree in Hertfordshire, followed by St Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford,^[1][3] where she studied Old and Middle English. She then studied at the London School of Economics, where she gained an MSc in Moral and Political Philosophy and Economic History.

Writing

Bidisha began writing for arts magazines i-D, Oyster, Volume, Dazed and Confused, and the NME at 15, after launching a style fanzine at age 14 influenced by the riot grrrl subculture. In 1995, at the age of 16, Bidisha signed a £15,000 book deal with HarperCollins. Her first novel, Seahorses, was published two years later, during her first year at university.^[4] During this time she also had regular opinion columns in The Big Issue magazine, The Daily Telegraph and the Thursday edition of The Independent newspaper. Bidisha's second novel, the thriller Too Fast to Live, was published when she was 21. Her third book, Venetian Masters – a travel memoir – was published in February 2008.^[5] She was a contributing editor of the women's literary magazine Sibyl and the style magazine 2nd Generation, and has written for The Guardian, the Financial Times, Mslexia, The Observer, New Statesman, and arts magazine The List.^[6]

International affairs were the subject of Venetian Masters (2008), which focused on Northern Italy, and Beyond the Wall (2012), a work of reportage. In 2013, she became a Fellow of the International Reporting Project run by Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Her role is to focus on international health development issues as part of a global network of reporters.^[7] Her fifth book, Asylum and Exile: The Hidden Voices of London, is based on her long term outreach work with asylum seekers and refugees.^[8][9]

Bidisha was one of the judges for the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was announced as one of the judges of the 2010 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.^[10] She is a patron of the SI Leeds Literary Prize for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian women in the UK.^[11][12] Bidisha is a trustee of the Booker Prize Foundation.^[13]

Broadcasting and film-making

In parallel with her writing, Bidisha has developed a career as a radio and TV arts critic and presenter.^[14] She is a regular guest on The Big Questions and Sunday Morning Live (BBC One), and also appeared as a regular panellist on BBC Two's Newsnight Review (BBC Two). For BBC Radio 4 she has contributed regularly to and presented Saturday Review, Front Row, Archive on Four, Heart and Soul and Woman's Hour.^[15] She was one of the regular presenters of BBC Radio 3's flagship arts programme, Night Waves.

On the World Service, she was a guest presenter of the books programme The Word, and was the regular presenter for The Strand.^[16] For Radio 3 and Radio 4 she has presented documentaries on Carl Jung, Iris Murdoch,^[17] the role of text in art (in Texting Andy Warhol) and The Countertenor.^[18] On TV she presented BBC Four's Secret Life of Books series edition on Jane Eyre^[19] and the Archive on Four documentary Mustn't Grumble, on complaining.^[20]

In 2017, she directed the 7-minute solo project An Impossible Poison, which was commissioned by the arts organisation Speaking Volumes and premiered in Berlin in November 2017.^[21] Her next visual project was a series of video shorts called the Aurora series, of which the first is Aurora: All is Well ^[22](October 2020).

Films

• An Impossible Poison, short film, 2017
• Aurora series,^[22] 6 short films, 2020-2023

Bibliography

• Seahorses (Flamingo, 1997) ISBN 0-00-655030-4
• Too Fast to Live (Duckworth Publishing, 2000) ISBN 0-7156-3008-3
• Venetian Masters (Summersdale Publishers, 2008) ISBN 1-84024-634-0
• Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine (Seagull 2012) ISBN 978-0-8574-20398
• Asylum and Exile: The Hidden Voices of London^[23] (Seagull 2015) ISBN 978-0857422101
• The Future of Serious Art (Tortoise Media, 2020) ISBN 978-1800180093^[24]

References

1. . BBC Radio 3. Archived from the original on 22 April 2009.
2. "Bidisha Mamata | The Guardian". the Guardian. Retrieved 1 December 2022.
3. List of famous graduates of St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
4. "On the threshold" 10 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine, The Times Educational Supplement, 21 March 1997. Retrieved 26 May 2010.
5. "Venetian Masters: Under the Skin of the City of Love" at Amazon.
6. Bidisha (15 July 2010). "Bring me sunshine – Gilbert and George at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art". The List. Edinburgh Festival Guide.
7. Fellows & Editors – International Reporting Project
8. Mehvish Arshad, "Bidisha calls for greater understanding of the lives of asylum seekers" 6 February 2015 at the Wayback Machine, Asia House, 26 January 2015.
9. "Asylum and Exile: The Hidden Voices of London" 6 February 2015 at the Wayback Machine, FreeWord.
10. . booktrade.info. 2 July 2010. Archived from the original on 22 March 2012. Retrieved 25 January 2012.
11. Patrons 13 November 2014 at the Wayback Machine, SI Leeds Literary Prize.
12. Bidisha, "'This is an issue at every level of publishing.' The SI Leeds Literary Prize tackles race, sex, diversity and literary fiction", 27 February 2014.
13. "Man Booker Prize announces global expansion" 16 December 2014 at the Wayback Machine, Man Booker Prize, 18 September 2013.
14. "The comeback kid: Whatever happened to feisty, mono-monikered teenage author Bidisha?" The Independent, 2 March 2008. Retrieved 25 July 2010.
15. "Woman's Hour 26-07-2010" BBC.CO.UK Retrieved 25 July 2010.
16. "Bidisha" BBC Profile 28 April 2006 26 July 2010
17. "An Unofficial Iris", BBC Radio 4 – Archive on 4, 1 June 2014.
18. BBC Radio 4 – The Countertenor, 24 November 2011.
19. "The Secret Life of Books", BBC Radio 4.
20. "Mustn't Grumble: The Noble British Art of Complaining", Archive on 4.
21. "Breaking Ground: Celebrating Writers of Colour". Speaking Volumes. 7 March 2017. Retrieved 8 February 2022.
22. Bidisha (13 October 2020), Aurora: All is Well (Short), Alessia Patregnani, retrieved 2 November 2020
23. "Asylum and Exile" 28 January 2015 at the Wayback Machine, University of Chicago Press.
24. Bidisha (12 November 2020). Futures. ISBN 9781800180093.

External links

• Official web site
• Column archive at UnHerd
• Column archive at the HuffPost
• Column archive at The Guardian
• Column archive at the New Statesman