Kavita Bedford

Kavita Bedford is a published author and Research Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney School of Communications. She has worked extensively in journalism, with her writing appearing in Guernica, The Guardian, The Saturday Paper and Griffith Review, as well as anthropology and literature. She is the 2020/21 Westwords Writer in Residence at The Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. Kavita frequently gives talks to high school students and guest lectures to both undergraduate and postgraduate level students in anthropology, global studies and creative writing. She has participated in panels for The Commonwealth Secretariat UK (Fiji), YouTube Creators for Change, Sydney Writers Festival, NSW Government, National Young Writers Festival, Newtown Festival, and The Walkley Foundation's Storyology conference. She was the editor of The Point Magazine, which explored countering violent extremism and community youth perspectives, and was the creative producer of digital media project, Mapping Frictions: Stories from South-West Sydney. Kavita’s first novel, Friends & Dark Shapes, was published in 2021 by Europa Editions (USA), Text Publishing (AUS) and Edizioni E/O (Italy) and was critically acclaimed in the New York Times. She is also a qualified Hatha yoga teacher in Sydney. Kavita Bedford’s 2018 Churchill Fellowship explored migrant narratives as a way of combatting violent extremism.