Anjali Mitter Duva

OFFICIAL BIO

Anjali Mitter Duva is an Indian American writer, editor, and publisher raised in France. She is the author of the bestselling historical novel FAINT PROMISE OF RAIN which was shortlisted for a William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She is a co-founder and publisher of Galiot Press, a new independent publisher ushering in a sea change for the written word. She is an instructor at Grub Street Writers and a former Fiction Co-Editor at Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices. She was a Finalist for a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship. Anjali co-founded and runs the Arlington Author Salon, a quarterly literary series with a twist; ran a ten-year book club for teens; and was a co-founder and executive director of Chhandika, a non-profit organization that teaches and presents India's classical storytelling kathak dance. Educated at Brown University and MIT, she lives in the Boston area.

More of the story

There's always more, isn't there? In this Q&A for the wonderful website Bloom, I cover some of the questions that are most often asked of me, such as:

• Your education and early career are in urban planning. How did you decide to leave your established career and pursue writing?

• You have a multicultural background—familial ties to India, growing up in France, and now living near Boston. How does having multiple cultural touch-points clarify or complicate the storytelling and writing process?

• Tell us more about the history of kathak dance, and how it became one of the inspirations behind your new novel, Faint Promise of Rain.

• You run a book club for children; do you find that children have a different way of reading than adults do?

• What inspired you to write historical fiction? Did you find unexpected things while conducting your research?

• You are planning a quartet of novels based on your study of kathak dance—can you give us a preview of what you are planning? How did you decide to write four separate novels?

• On your blog, there is a lovely, entertaining, and very practical guide to designing your own writer’s retreat. You share that picking the right company is key—how did you meet your other fellow writers, and how does writing as a group compare to the stereotypical image of writers as working alone?

• Who are the authors who inspired you early in your writing career, and who are you reading now?

Links to Some things I care about