The Speculative Literature Foundation is pleased to announce that Mimi Mondal is the winner of the 2022 AC Bose Grant.

Cosponsored by the SLF and DesiLit, the AC Bose Grant has been offering support to South Asian / South Asian diaspora writers working within the speculative fiction genre.  While applicants may submit adult works, the grant is also accessible to teen authors who take priority during the review process.  The AC Bose Grant was founded by Rupa and Gautam Bose in memory of their father, Ashim Chandra Bose, who fostered a love of reading and science fiction in his children, in the hope that it will continue to nourish promising works in the genre that continue to move and inspire us all.

Mondal’s winning piece is “Twenty-Nine Days Before Remaking the World.”

Mimi Mondal (she/they) was nominated for the Nebula Award in 2020 for her novelette His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light (Tor.com/Realm.fm). Her debut Dungeons & Dragons adventure, named “In the Mists of Manivarsha” and inspired by Bengal from the 5th-6th century CE, is forthcoming in the book Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel (Wizards of the Coast, June 2022). Her fiction can be found on Strange Horizons, Fireside Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction, Vol. 1, and elsewhere, and her nonfiction column “Extraordinary Alien” on Hindustan Times.

“Twenty-Nine Days Before Remaking the World” was originally written in 2019 under the patronage of the Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin, which published the story in German translation by Anke Caroline Burger. The current version of the story is somewhat different from what it was three years ago and may undergo a few other changes before it appears in Clarkesworld Magazine.

Mimi was born and raised in Kolkata, India, and currently lives in New York City, where she grows hydroponic flowers in the winter, reads (e)books on the grass at public parks in the summer, and takes late-night walks by the East River in all seasons.