Satinder Kaur Chohan
Radio/tv/screenwriter
About
Satinder Kaur Chohan is a writer, primarily of plays and audio dramas, whose stories explore hidden global South Asian worlds and characters. Her first play Zameen centres around a struggling Punjabi cotton-farming family in rapidly globalising India. Subsequent plays include Made in India about a Gujarati commercial surrogacy (which received the Adopt a Playwright award), its offspring, young people’s play Half of Me (created while writer in residence at the Centre for Family Research (University of Cambridge)) and Lotus Beauty, about conflicting multigenerational women in a British Asian beauty salon. Audio dramas include an adaptation of Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Girl of Ink and Stars (Spark Arts), an adaptation of Pam Gems’ Camille (BBC Radio 3) and Southall Uprising (BBC Radio 4) about the charged community protests of April 1979.
Satinder has also worked extensively as a journalist, editing pioneering British Asian arts and style magazine 2nd Generation, and written for numerous publications and websites. As a radio, documentary and film researcher, she has worked for BBC Radio 5, Channel 4 and BBC documentaries (including the Royal Television Society nominated Who’s Teaching Today?) and assorted film development projects.
She is from Southall, West London, and her hometown continues to inspire her storytelling and more recent forays into film (short film Bussing) and fiction (short story ‘Chet’ was previously shortlisted for the Guardian/4th Estate prize). Both an English and creative-writing tutor, dramaturg and mentor, she strongly believes in the power of language to embolden and transform especially marginalised people and communities like her own.