Shilpi Suneja shares the first pages of her debut novel, House of Caravans, how she discovered the core of her story (and therefore where to begin) after several rounds of revising, her use of the omniscient first person and how she transitions between characters’ internal states without losing her reader, and the weight of history both on her book and her psyche as a writer.
Suneja’s first pages can be found here.
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Shilpi Suneja was born in Kanpur, India. At the age of fifteen, she moved with her parents to a tiny village in North Carolina. She later earned an MA in English from NYU, an MFA from BU, and another MFA from UMass Boston. She’s won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her short fiction and essays, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, appear in Arrowsmith, Asia Literary Review, Bat City Review, Cognoscenti, Consequence, Guernica, Hyphen, Kartika Review, Kafila, Little Fiction, McSweeney's, Michigan Quarterly Review, Solstice, Stirring Lit, and TwoCircles.Net among other places. In 2019 Shilpi attended the Jack Jones Literary Retreat as a Desai Fellow. Her essay won the 2022 Bechtel Prize from Teachers & Writers Magazine. Her first novel about the long shadow of the Indian Partition of 1947, her grandfather's story of migration from Lahore to Kanpur, is slated for publication in September 2023 from Milkweed Editions.
Passages: Shilpi Suneja on House of Caravans