Ashoka University

Janice Pariat is a storyteller of British, Portuguese, and indigenous Khasi origins. She is the award-winning author of Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories, along with the novels Seahorse and Nine Chambered-Heart, bestselling in India. Her writings have been translated into ten languages, including Italian, Spanish, French, and German. In 2013, she received the Young Writer Award from the Sahitya Akademi and the Crossword Book Award for Fiction.

Her novel Everything the Light Touches was featured in The New Yorker’s list of Best Books of 2022 and earned her multiple literary prizes, including the Author Award for Best Fiction, the Sushila Devi Award, the Pen and Paper Fiction Award, and the Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize in 2023.

In 2014, Janice was the Charles Wallace Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Kent, UK, and later a Writer in Residence at the TOJI Residency in South Korea in 2019. In Fall 2024, she was a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation Centre at Bellagio, Italy.

Currently, she teaches Creative Writing and Art History at Ashoka University. She splits her time between Shillong and New Delhi, where she lives with a cat of many names.