Bidisha Chakraborty, with her manuscript-in-progress, The Fold, is a 2025 New Voices writer.

About The Fold: Maya, a pregnant newly-wed, moves from London to a little town in southern Chile, on the edge of a vast lake, surrounded by mountains and volcanoes. She initially finds the idyllic setting quaint, if somewhat archaic, with its large families, fixed gender roles that appear to come from a different era, and omnipresent Germanic iconography.

She is invited to join the Lake Heights ladies' book club, and soon the eclectic group of women become her lifeline as she finds the town, and her role in it, increasingly claustrophobic. But when she stumbles upon evidence of the town's links to Nazi Germany, she begins to wonder whether the club, and the town itself, are hiding secrets in plain sight.

Structured in twelve parts, each based around a seminal work of Latin American literature, The Fold follows Maya's journey from naivety to awakening against an insidious authoritarian regime.

About Bidisha: Born in India, Bidisha grew up in London, via stints in York, the US and Spain, before moving to Chile in late 2013. She finds writing dystopian fiction an excellent antidote to the joys of raising three young children, and has been long- and short-listed in various writing awards over the years, including Fish, Aesthetica and the Bristol Prize. She completed the Faber Academy Writing a Novel Online course in 2024 and was longlisted in 2022´s BPA Pitch Award with a previous manuscript.