Balli Kaur Jaswal

Balli Kaur Jaswal is a Singaporean novelist. Her second novel Sugarbread was a finalist for the 2015 inaugural Epigram Books Fiction Prize. Her third novel, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows was released in 2017, and garnered her a wider international following, driven in part by being picked as a selection for Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine online book club. In 2019, the Business Times described Jaswal as "the most internationally well-known Singapore novelist after Crazy Rich Asians’ Kevin Kwan." She studied English at Hollins University in the United States In 2007, she was awarded the David T.K. Wong Fellowship for writing at University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, which supports English-language writing about Asia. During the early part of her career, Jaswal taught high-school English in Australia for several years, and taught at an international school in Istanbul. She gave up teaching in 2016 when the sale of her novel Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows allowed her to take up writing full-time. In May 2017, Jaswal wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times entitled "The Censor and the Vibrator" in which she addressed the challenges of living under Singaporean government censorship, including growing up with a skewed and incomplete understanding of sex.

Jaswal has been seen both as a voice of the Punjabi diaspora, and a critic of Punjabi communities. Reluctant to be "pigeon-holed" as solely as a writer of the Punjabi diaspora, Jaswal said in 2019 that her next novel would feature Filipino domestic workers in Singapore.

Shuma Raha, reviewer for the Indian newspaper The Hindu describes the novel as "comfort" reading "refreshingly free from [the] nostalgia-soaked cultural clutter" that can be typical of diaspora novels. She notes, however, that the "only problem" with the book is that the mature voice of the book strains its credibility as that of ten-year-olds viewpoint. and Kirkus Reviews, and was featured in Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine Book Club.

Reviewer Indira Chandrasekhar sees the novel's approach as using humor to provide some lightness while she takes on patriarchy as a serious problem throughout the novel.

Novels Inheritance (Sleepers Publishing, 2013) Sugarbread (2014) Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows (Harper Collins/William Morrow, 2017) The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters (Harper Collins/William Morrow, 2019) Now You See Us (Harper Collins/William Morrow, 2023)