Shilpa Agarwal
Shilpa Agarwal is a Los Angeles-based writer and academic. Born in Mumbai to a family uprooted by India's Independence movement and made refugees by its subsequent Partition, Shilpa's early writings explored how colonialism and the chaos of dislocation shaped human interaction.
As an undergraduate at Duke University, Shilpa specialized in Asian and African literatures and Women's Studies. She pursued her interest in post-colonial literatures as a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles. She taught at both UCLA and UCSB, including a course on South Asian diaspora, and spoke regularly on the politics and poetics of community.
Shilpa's current writing is informed by glimpses into moments of alienation and awakening, especially during geographic and metaphoric crossings: east meets west, centers meet the peripheries, the living meet the dead. She writes to call up the haunting utterances of the excluded, to excavate fragmentary memories that edge consciousness, and to imagine a more nuanced narrative of history itself.
Shilpa's first novel, HAUNTING BOMBAY, is a winner of the First Words Literary Prize for South Asian writers.
“If only certain things had been preventable, his life would have unfurled in front of him as intended, like a lush Oriental carpet. No surprises, no detours. Just a thick tapestry of days and nights that at the end of his time on earth, he could roll up and proudly claim as his own.”