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Parini Shroff received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she studied under Elizabeth McCracken, Alexander Chee, and Cristina García. She is a practicing attorney and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Bandit Queens is her debut novel.
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Dear Reader,
On February 14, 2013, I repaid the last of my law school loans. By that May, I'd quit my firm in Los Angeles to move to Austin, Texas to write. That summer, before I began my MFA program at UT, I visited my family in India.
While in Gujarat, my father, my brother, and I drove to the village of Samadra, to attend a women's meeting of microloan group my father was involved in financing. I'd viewed my debt as shackles to a job for which I wasn't particularly suited. To these women, however, loans were a boon, a buoy offering life and independence. Money lent them agency—so long as the men around them permitted it, that is.
By the time I was on a plane to Texas, Geeta and Farah were born within a short story and had forged an economic alliance to "get rid" of Farah's money-siphoning husband. They were unsuccessful back then and the story ended with a quiet fizzle.
It was not until years later that I had the thought: But what if they actually did it? Not only that, what if other women wanted in on the action?
This book is set in a fictional village in Gujarat, where its denizens have recently acquired city comforts such as toilets and solar power. Despite these struggles specific to developing ...
Amana Fontanella-Khan is a contributor to Slate, the Daily Beast, the New York Times, and the Christian Science Monitor, and was formerly a contributing editor at Vogue India. Previously based in Mumbai, she now lives in ... (more)
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Deepti Kapoor was born in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, and grew up in Bombay, Bahrain and Dehradun. In 1997 she went to the University of Delhi to study journalism and later completed an MA in Social Psychology. She spent the ... (more)
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