About

Deepa Anappara’s debut novel Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line was named as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time and NPR. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, and shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Indian Literature. Time included it in its list of ‘The 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time’. It has been translated into over twenty languages.

Anappara is the co-editor of Letters to a Writer of Colour, a collection of personal essays on fiction, race, and culture, published by Random House (US) and Vintage (UK) in 2023.

Her second novel, The Last of Earth, will be published by Random House in the US, and Penguin Random House in India, in January 2026, and by Oneworld in the UK in February 2026.

She has a PhD in Creative-Critical Writing and an MA in Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) from the University of East Anglia, Norwich. She teaches creative writing at City St George’s, University of London, and is currently part of the fiction faculty of the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, North Carolina. She is also a mentor on the South Asia Speaks mentorship programme for emerging writers in South Asia.

Anappara was born in Kerala, southern India, and worked as a journalist in India for eleven years. Her reports on the impact of poverty and religious violence on the education of children won the Developing Asia Journalism Awards, the Every Human has Rights Media Awards, and the Sanskriti-Prabha Dutt Fellowship in Journalism.