Shubha Sunder wins Whiting Award for fiction

Indian American author’s storytelling “is confident, her prose charged; it compresses the everyday with the kind of force that renders carbon into jewel.”

By Arun Kumar

Indian American author Shubha Sunder has won the Whiting Award for fiction, an award “designed to recognize excellence and promise in a spectrum of emerging talent.”

The award given by the Whiting Foundation comes with a monetary prize of $50,000 which aims to give winners “the chance to devote themselves full time to their own writing, or to take bold new risks in their work.”

READ: Seven Indian Americans among 2025 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows (April 11th, 2025) 

Sunder is among this year’s ten winners in various categories coming from a diverse array of racial and ethnic backgrounds – and from locations around the country and the world. They are poets, playwrights, novelists, and historians.

“These writers demonstrate astounding range; each has invented the tools they needed to carve out their narratives and worlds,” Courtney Hodell, Whiting’s Director of Literary Programs, said of the winning ten.

“Beneath the calm surface of Shubha Sunder’s beautifully lucid fiction lies another world of exceptional depth—emotional, psychological, and political,” the selection committee wrote about Sunder’s work.

“Sunder’s storytelling is confident, her prose charged; it compresses the everyday with the kind of force that renders carbon into jewel. With the steadiness of her gaze and the slow unwinding of story, she draws you in so far that you might as well be one of her characters.”

Her first book, Boomtown Girl, a short story collection set in her hometown of Bangalore, India, won the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award and was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Story Award and the New American Press Fiction Prize.

Shubha’s stories and essays have appeared in places like Catapult, The Common, New Letters, Crazyhorse, and Narrative Magazine, and received notable mentions in Best American Short Stories. Her debut novel, Optional Practical Training, an immigrant novel in conversations set in the United States, was published by Graywolf Press.

She is a 2020 recipient of the City of Boston Artist Fellowship Award and a 2016 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. She lives in Boston and teaches creative writing at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Optional Practical Training “coheres into a crystalline portrait of a woman straddling cultures and expectations while attempting to discover who she is. It’s a knockout, ” according tonPublishers Weekly review.

“On the surface, Optional Practical Training is about the initial phase that many educated American immigrants go through nowadays, but at heart it is about how migrations change one from within and without,” writes Ha Jin, National Book Award winner and author of The Woman Back from Moscow. “This story, fundamentally American as well as universal, is told in supple prose, with ease and grace, and gives a great deal of pleasure and insight.”