Kiran Kaur Saini is the winner of the Speculative Literature Foundation’s 2020 Older Writers Grant.

Graham Robert Scott, Jeff Reynolds, and S.E. Greco received Honorable Mentions.

Kiran Kaur Saini is a writer of speculative and literary fiction whose short stories have appeared in Glimmer Train , Pleiades , and The Tahoma Literary Review , among other publications. She is a graduate of Smith College and received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.

Born in California, Kiran grew up in rural Pennsylvania, the daughter of a Sikh from Punjab and a North Carolina native. In the last year Kiran stepped away from a 15-year career in film production to care for her aging mother and now finds her writing focused on issues of aging, cultural identity, and autonomy.

The Speculative Literature Foundation’s Older Writers Grant is awarded annually since 2004 to a writer who is fifty years of age or older at the time of grant application, and is intended to assist such writers who are just starting to work at a professional level. The $1,000 grant can be used as each writer determines will best assist his or her work.

Founded in January 2004 to promote literary quality in speculative fiction, the all-volunteer Speculative Literature Foundation is led by Mary Anne Mohanraj and 30 other committed volunteers.

[Based on a press release.]