Vauhini Vara has worked as a journalist and an editor for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the New York Times Magazine. Her fiction has been honored by the O. Henry Prize and the Rona JaffeFoundation. Her first novel, The Immortal King Rao, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the Atta Galatta–Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize for fiction as well as the JK Paper–Times of India AutHER Award for best debut.