Nicola Dinan

Nicola Dinan is a British-Malaysian novelist born in 1994. She studied law at Cambridge and creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Bellies (2023, Fourth Estate) is her debut novel, following Tom and Ming who meet as students at Cambridge, fall in love, and then navigate their relationship as Ming comes out as a trans woman. Warm, witty, and deeply humane, the novel explores gender transition, desire, and the difficulty of loving someone across profound change, from the perspective of both a cis man and a trans woman. It won the Polari First Book Prize in 2024 and was widely praised for its generous, unsentimental portrayal of trans experience. Dinan has written about her own experience as a trans woman in essays and interviews. Her work is part of a growing body of British fiction by and about trans people that has emerged in the 2020s.