Pragya Agarwal
Non-fiction writer
About
Dr Pragya Agarwal is a behavioural and data scientist and author of four widely acclaimed nonfiction books. Her first book Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias (Bloomsbury, 2020) was Guardian Book of the Week. Her books (M)otherhood: On the Choices of Being a Woman (Canongate, 2021) and Hysterical: Exploding the Myth of Gendered Emotions (Canongate, 2022) have been nominated as best books of the year by Waterstones, the Telegraph, the New Statesman, and others. In 2022, she was awarded the Transmission prize for ‘making complex scientific ideas accessible’ and the Society of Authors Foundation award.
Pragya holds a PhD from The University of Nottingham and has been a senior academic across universities in the UK and USA. Most recently, she has been a visiting Professor of Social Inequities at Loughborough University, a Fulbright scholar, a British Library fellow, and a Churchill fellow for her research in reproductive justice, gender and racial inequalities, bias and inclusive education. As well as numerous well-cited academic publications, she has also written widely for the Guardian, the Independent, Prospect, New Scientist, Scientific American, Wired, the TLS, and Literary Hub.
Pragya teaches creative writing for the Irish Writers Centre, Arvon and Ty Newydd. She moved to the UK from India almost twenty years ago and now lives between the UK and Ireland with her family. She is currently writing a book about feminist mapping.