Class of 2022
Class of 2022
Meet the Mentors
Prayaag Akbar
2021 - 2024
Prayaag Akbar is the author of Leila (2017) which won the Crossword Jury Prize and the Tata Lit Live! First Book Award and was shortlisted for the Hindu Prize for Best Fiction and the Shakti Bhatt Award. It was developed into a series by Netflix, directed by Deepa Mehta.
Prayaag has worked as a journalist in a number of leading Indian publications. He was a consulting editor with Mint, an Indian financial newspaper, and before that was the deputy editor of the news website Scroll, where he was an early member of the team. He is a Senior Fellow at Krea University.
Deepa Anappara
2022- 2024
Deepa Anappara's debut novel Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line was named as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time and NPR. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, and shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Indian Literature.
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A partial of the novel won the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writer’s Award, and the Bridport/Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award for a First Novel. It is being translated into 22 languages.
Fatima Bhutto
Head of
Climate Projects
2021 - 2024
Fatima Bhutto studied at Columbia University, New York, and at SOAS in London. Her books include Songs Of Blood And Sword, an account of her family and Pakistani politics, and the novels The Shadow Of The Crescent Moon and The Runaways. Her latest book is New Kings of the World: Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi and K-Pop. She lives in Karachi, Pakistan.
Rahul Bhatia
2021-2024
Rahul Bhatia is a former Reuters correspondent based in Mumbai. His writing appears in The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The Caravan. He is the co-founder of the journalism website Peepli.org. He is a 2022–2023 Lisa Goldberg Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard.
Isaac Chotiner
2021 - 2024
Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to Q. & A.
Head of
Poetry
Tishani Doshi
2022 - 2024
Tishani Doshi is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award for Poetry, winner of the All-India Poetry Competition, and her first book, COUNTRIES OF THE BODY, won the prestigious Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2006. GIRLS ARE COMING OUT OF THE WOODS was shortlisted for the TED HUGHES AWARD & a Firecracker Award.
Tishani's debut novel, THE PLEASURE SEEKERS, was shortlisted for the Hindu Literary Prize and long-listed for the Orange Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. SMALL DAYS AND NIGHTS, her second novel, has been shortlisted for the TATA BEST FICTION AWARD 2019 and the RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 2020. A GOD AT THE DOOR, her fourth full-length collection, published in 2021, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry.
She is Visiting Associate Professor of Practice, Literature and Creative Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi.
McKenzie Funk
2021 - 2022
National Magazine Award finalist McKenzie Funk writes for Harper’s, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, and the London Review of Books.
His first book, Windfall, won a PEN Literary Award and was named a book of the year by The New Yorker, Mother Jones, Salon, and Amazon.com. A former Knight-Wallace Fellow and Open Society Fellow, he is a cofounder of the journalism cooperative Deca and a board member at Amplifier. He speaks five languages and is a native of the Pacific Northwest, where he lives with his wife and sons.
Founder
& Project Director
Sonia Faleiro
2021 - 2024
Sonia Faleiro is the author of The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing (2021) and Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars (2010).
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Her writing has received support from the Pulitzer Centre, The Investigative Fund, The Society of Authors Foundation' and K Blundell Trust, and The Royal Literary Fund. Her work appears in The New York Times, The Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement, Harper's, Granta, 1843, and MIT Technology Review.
Sonia is the founder and program director of South Asia Speaks. She is also the founder of the philanthropic initiative Artists for India, and the cofounder of the journalism cooperative Deca.
She lives in London where she is a Royal Literary Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Samar Halarnkar
2021 - 2023
Samar Halarnkar is the founder of Article 14 and the co-founder of India Love Project. Previously, he was the editor of Indiaspend.org, a data-driven non-profit. He helped set up the Independent and Public-Spirited Media Foundation, a non-partisan trust created to fund public-interest journalism in India. He lives in Bangalore.
Marc Herman
2021 - 2023
Marc Herman is the author of The Wizard and the Volcano, a reconstruction of the eruption of Indonesia's Mt. Merapi; The Shores of Tripoli, a dispatch from the Libyan civil war; and Searching for El Dorado, an account of his travels with gold prospectors in the Amazon forest. He is a cofounder of the journalism cooperative Deca. His writing has appeared in dozens of publications including The Atlantic, Harper's Bazaar, Slate, The Believer and GQ.
Raised in California, He lives in Barcelona.
Tania James
2021
Tania James is the author of the novel Atlas of Unknowns, the short story collection Aerogrammes, and the novel The Tusk That Did the Damage, all published by Knopf. Atlas was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, an Indie Next Notable, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and a Best Book of 2009 for The San Francisco Chronicle and NPR. Aerogrammes was a Best Book of 2012 for Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and The San Francisco Chronicle.
Her stories have appeared in Boston Review, Granta, Kenyon Review, One Story, and A Public Space.
Two stories from Aerogrammes were finalists for Best American Short Stories 2008 and 2013. The Tusk That Did the Damage was named a Best Book of 2015 by The San Francisco Chronicle and NPR, and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. In 2016, Tusk was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and longlisted for the Financial Times/Oppenheimer Award.
Tania has been a fellow of Ragdale, Macdowell, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. She teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University and lives in Washington DC.
Aruni Kashyap
2021 - 2022
Aruni Kashyap is a writer and translator. He is the author of His Father’s Disease (Flipped Eye Books, UK) and the novel The House With a Thousand Stories (Viking/ Penguin Random House, 2013). He has also translated from Assamese and introduced celebrated Indian writer Indira Goswami's last work of fiction, The Bronze Sword of Thengphakhri Tehsildar (Zubaan Books, 2013). His first Assamese novel is Noikhon Etia Duroit (Panchajanya Books, 2019). His poetry collection, There is No Good Time for Bad News (Future Cycle Press, 2021) was a finalist for the 2018 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and 2018 Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry.
He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, Athens.​
Mira Kamdar
2021 - 2024
Mira Kamdar's first book was a critically acclaimed memoir, Motiba’s Tattoos: A Granddaughter’s Journey from America into her Indian Family’s Past (Public Affairs 2000; Plume 2001). It was a 2000 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection and won the 2002 Washington Book Award. Her second book was Planet India: The Turbulent Rise of the World’s Largest Democracy and the Future of our World (Scribner 2008). In 2018, Oxford University Press published her book India in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know. Mira also published her first book originally written in French, 80 mots de l’Inde (L’Asiathèque 2018), a collection of columns she wrote for Courrier international between 2008 and 2014.
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Mira was a member of the Editorial Board of the The New York Times from 2013 to 2017 where she wrote on international affairs.
Karan Mahajan
2021 - 2023
Karan Mahajan grew up in New Delhi, India and moved to the US for college. His first novel, Family Planning (2008), was a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. It was published in nine countries. His second novel, The Association of Small Bombs (2016), was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Awards and was named one of the "10 Best Books of 2016" by The New York Times.
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Karan's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker Online, The New Republic and other venues.
He is an assistant professor in Literary Arts at Brown University.
Aanchal Malhotra
Head of Partition Projects
2021 - 2024
Aanchal Malhotra is an oral historian and writer, living in New Delhi, India. She is the co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory - a digital repository tracing family histories and social ethnography through heirlooms, collectibles and antiques from the Indian subcontinent.
Malhotra writes extensively on the 1947 Partition and its related topics. Her first book, published in South Asia as Remnants of a Separation (2017) and internationally as Remnants of Partition (2019), was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar, British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, Hindu Lit for Life Non Fiction Prize, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize and the Shakti Bhatt First Book prize.
Her second book on the generational impact of Partition, titled In the Language of Remembering is forthcoming in autumn 2022.
Sanam Maher
2021 - 2024
Sanam Maher is a journalist and author based in Karachi, Pakistan. She has covered stories on Pakistan’s art and culture, business, politics, religious minorities and women.
Her work has appeared in The New York Times, BBC, Al Jazeera, The Caravan, and The Times Literary Supplement, amongst others. Her first book, A Woman Like Her: The Short Life of Qandeel Baloch, an investigation into the murder of Pakistan’s first social media celebrity, was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2020 by The New York Times and The New Yorker.
Head of Translation
Arunava Sinha
2021 - 2024
Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and nonfiction into English. Sixty-one of his translations have been published so far.
Twice the winner of the Crossword translation award, for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), respectively, and the winner of the Muse India translation award (2013) for Buddhadeva Bose’s When The Time Is Right, he has also been shortlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction prize (2009) for his translation of Chowringhee and for the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative Translated YA Book Prize for his translation of Md Zafar Iqbal’s Rasha, and longlisted for the Best Translated Book award, USA, 2018 for his translation of Bhaskar Chakravarti’s Things That Happen and Other Poems.
He is an associate professor of practice in the Creative Writing department at Ashoka University.
Samanth Subramanian
2021 - 2023
Samanth Subramanian is a senior writer for Quartz, covering the future of capitalism, and a contributing writer for the Guardian Long Read. He is also the author of three books: Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War, and his latest, A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane.
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A Dominant Character was shortlisted for the Duff-Cooper and the Tata Literature Live! Non Fiction Book of the Year. “This Divided Island” won the 2015 Crossword Prize for Non Fiction and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Non Fiction Prize and the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize the same year. “Following Fish” won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize in 2010 and was shortlisted for the Andre Simon Award in 2013.
Mahesh Rao
2021 - 2024
Mahesh Rao was born and grew up in Nairobi, Kenya. He studied politics and economics at the University of Bristol and law at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics. In the UK he has worked as a lawyer, academic researcher and bookseller. His short fiction has been shortlisted for various awards, including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, The Baffler, Prairie Schooner and Elle.
His debut novel, The Smoke Is Rising, won the Tata First Book Award for fiction and was shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and the Crossword Prize. One Point Two Billion, his collection of short stories, was followed by the novel Polite Society. (2019)
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Madhuri Vijay
2021 - 2024
Madhuri Vijay is the author of The Far Field. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, Best American Non-Required Reading, and Narrative Magazine.
Mirza Waheed
2021
Mirza Waheed was born and brought up in Kashmir. His debut novel, The Collaborator, was an international bestseller, was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award and the Shakti Bhat Prize, and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. It was selected by Waterstones as part of its big literary debut promotion, 'Waterstones 11'. His second novel, The Book of Gold Leaves was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2016, longlisted for the Folio Prize, and was a finalist for the 2015 Tata Literature Live! Book of the Year (Fiction).
Waheed's new novel Tell Her Everything was nominated for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2019 and Tata Literature Live Book of the Year. Tell Her Everything won the Hindu Prize for Fiction 2019.
Nikita Lalwani
2021
Nikita Lalwani is a novelist and screenwriter. She has written three novels: Gifted, The Village, and You People (2020). Gifted was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and won the Desmond Elliott Prize. Nikita was also nominated for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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Nikita lives in London.
Altaf Tyrewala
2021
Altaf Tyrewala is the author of the critically acclaimed novels No God In Sight MacAdam/Cage, 2006), Ministry of Hurt Sentiments (Harper Collins India, 2012) and ​Engglishhh (Harper Collins India, 2014). He is the editor of Mumbai Noir (Akashic, 2012).
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He lives in Dallas.
Mansi Choksi
2024
Mansi Choksi is the author of The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern India and guest co-host of Love Commandos from Rough Translation.
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She is a journalist based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Mumbai, India, and writes about crime, gender, identity, opportunity and pop-culture. She is a two-time Livingston Award finalist and winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Madeline Dane Ross Award and the South Asian Journalists Association's Outstanding Arts and Culture Reporting Award.
Roman Gautam
2024
Roman Gautam is the Editor of Himal Southasian. He has over a decade of experience in magazine journalism in South Asia. He earlier spent nine years at The Caravan, the award-winning magazine of narrative and investigative journalism published from Delhi, where he served as Senior Editor.
Srinath Perur
2024
Srinath Perur is the author of the travelogue If It’s Monday It Must Be Madurai. He has translated several significant works in Kannada into English including playwright Girish Karnad’s memoir This Life at Play and novelist Vivek Shanbhag’s works Ghachar Ghochar and Sakina’s Kiss.
Nikesh Shukla
2024
Nikesh Shukla is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter. He wrote the 2023 Spider-Man India miniseries Seva for Marvel and recently released the first book in his kids’ book series, The Council Of Good Friends. He is also the author of three YA novels, Run, Riot, The Boxer and Stand Up. He is the author of Coconut Unlimited, Meatspace, and The One Who Wrote Destiny. His latest book, Brown Baby: A Memoir Of Race, Family And Home was longlisted for the Jhalak Prize. He has also written a book on writing called Your Story Matters. Nikesh is the editor of the bestselling essay collection, The Good Immigrant, which won the reader's choice at the Books Are My Bag Awards. He co-edited The Good Immigrant USA with Chimene Suleyman. He is the co-founder of The Good Literary Agency.
Head of Beyond Ability
Abhishek Annica
2024
Abhishek Anicca is a writer, poet, and spoken word performer who identifies as a person with a disability and chronic illness. Abhishek holds a Masters degree from Tata Institute of Social Sciences and an MPhil degree in Women and Gender Studies from Ambedkar University. He is a researcher who works on disability and gender, especially on the relationship between disability, masculinity and sexuality. He is also the founder of Dislang, an online magazine that publishes narratives by disabled and chronically ill people. Abhishek's first book in English, The Grammar of my Body, a memoir of living with disability and chronic illness, was published by Vintage India in 2023.
VV Ganeshananthan
2025
V. V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night (winner of the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction and the 2024 Carol Shields Prize, and Love Marriage (longlisted for the Women's Prize). A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she is a member of the boards of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. The National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Yaddo, MacDowell, and the American Academy in Berlin have awarded her fellowships. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, where she is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of English. She co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.