Jini Reddy

Jini Reddy is an award-winning writer and journalist. She is the author of Wanderland (Bloomsbury, 2020), shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing and for the Stanford Dolman Award for Travel Book of the Year. Her first book, Wild Times (Bradt, 2016), won the Adele Evans Award at the British Guild of Travel Writers Awards and was a finalist at the Travel Media Awards. She has contributed to several anthologies including the landmark Women on Nature (Unbound, 2021), Winter (Elliot and Thompson, 2016) and Freewheeling (Daunt, 2025). Her texts and poems have been displayed in London, including at the Winter Light exhibition at London’s Southbank Centre, where she was commissioned to write six poems — the sole writer among twenty visual artists.

She has spoken widely at festivals and events, including at the Hay Festival, where she delivered the inaugural Jan Morris Lecture. She has been a contributor to podcasts and radio programmes, among them The Verb for Radio 3 and The Compass for the BBC World Service, and a judge on the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize and the Stanford Dolman Award for Travel Book of the Year.  Jini leads creative non-fiction writing workshops, delivers guest lectures at universities, coaches aspiring writers and especially enjoys working with people from underrepresented backgrounds. 

As a features and travel writer, her byline has appeared in The Guardian, the i-paper, The Independent, The Times, Sunday Times Style, The Daily and Sunday Telegraph, Financial Times, TIME magazine, National Geographic Traveller and many other publications, both print and digital. In 2019 she was named a National Geographic Women of Impact. She began her career in book publishing, working for Penguin Books and Pan Macmillan and has taught English in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Born in London to Indian parents who were raised in South Africa, Jini grew up in Montreal, Quebec. She received her B.A in Geography from McGill University in Montreal and her M.A. in English Literature at Avignon University in France. She holds a diploma in French Languages and Literature from Aix Marseille University and studied Journalism at the London College of Communications. Jini now lives in a leafy south west London suburb.