Nikita Lalwani has been announced the 2008 winner of the £10,000 Desmond Elliott Prize for Sparkling New Fiction, for her book Gifted The Desmond Elliott Prize is a new biennial prize for a first novel written in English and published in the UK. The grand prize is £10,000 and named after the literary agent and publisher, Desmond Elliott.

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A story about a maths prodigy growing up in 1980s Cardiff. Numbers have filled Rumi Vasi’s world since she first learned to count. But it was on a trip to India at the age of 8 that her mathematical powers acquired their almost supernatural significance. When she returned home to Cardiff her destiny was sealed: she was now, and would forever be, the town’s ‘maths prodigy’. At 14 Rumi is firmly set on the path of a gifted child, speeding headlong towards Oxford University. As her father sees it, discipline is everything if the family has any hope of making its mark on its adoptive country. However, as Rumi gets older and the family’s stark isolation intensifies, numbers start to lose their magic for the young teenager: she abandons the rigid timetable of her afternoons to seek out friendship and replaces equations with rampant spice abuse. As her longing for love and her parents’ will to succeed deepen, so too does the rift between generations.