Vineetha Mokkil is the winner of the Speculative Literature Foundation’s 2024 A.C. Bose Grant.
Mokkil’s winning piece is called “No One Has To Know and Other Stories.” She is the author of the short story collection, A Happy Place and Other Stories (HarperCollins). Her new collection, Lawrence of Arabia and Other Stories, is forthcoming from Hawakal Publishers. Her work has appeared in the anthologies The Best Asian Short Stories 2018 (Kitaab, Singapore), The Punch Magazine Anthology of New Writing (Niyogi Books, New Delhi), and Things Left and Found at the Side of the Road (Ad Hoc Fiction, UK). She is currently based in New Delhi, India.
Her stories have been published in the Santa Fe Writers’ Project Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Fictive Dream, Barren magazine, The Bombay Review, and Asian Cha, among other journals. Poems translated by her from Malayalam to English have been published in Indian Love Poems (ed. Meena Alexander, Everyman’s Library, USA). The flash fiction collection, Lightning Strikes: An Anthology of Flash Fiction by Fifty Indian Writers (Dhauli Books), edited and introduced by her, was published in 2024. Mokkil was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2019 and shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award. Her journalistic writing has appeared in The Hindu, Outlook, The Times of India, Open, and Asian Review of Books.
In 2019, the Speculative Literature Foundation and DesiLit co-sponsored the A.C. Bose Grant in memory of Ashim Chandra Bose, a lover of books—especially science fiction and fantasy. Bose’s children, Rupa Bose and Gautam Bose, founded the grant to honor the legacy of the worlds their father opened up for them. The donors hope that this grant will help develop work that will let young people imagine different worlds and possibilities. The A.C. Bose Grant annually provides $1,000 to South Asian or Desi diaspora writers developing speculative fiction. Visit speculativeliterature.org/grants for more information.
Launched in January 2004 to promote literary quality in speculative fiction, the Speculative Literature Foundation addresses historical inequities in access to literary opportunities for marginalized writers. The SLF is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, entirely supported by community donations. For more information, visit speculativeliterature.org.
The Speculative Literature Foundation is partially funded by the Oak Park Area Arts Council, Village of Oak Park, Illinois Arts Council Agency, National Endowment for the Arts and Oak Park River Forest Community Foundation.
[Based on a press release.]