The Speculative Literature Foundation is pleased to announce that Sohini Basak is the winner of the 2023 Gulliver Travel Grant.

Since 2004, the Gulliver Travel Grant has sought to assist writers of speculative literature (in fiction, poetry, drama, or creative nonfiction) in their research. The grant awards one writer $1000 annually, to be used to cover airfare, lodging, and/or other travel expenses.

Basak’s winning piece is Fox in Rain.

Sohini Basak is a writer of fiction, poetry, and the in-between. Her first poetry collection We Live in the Newness of Small Differences was awarded the inaugural International Beverly Manuscript Prize and published in 2018. Her poems are featured in print anthologies from Penguin Press (India), Red Hen Press (USA), Emma Press (UK), and Math Paper Press (Singapore). Her fiction has been published in journals like 3 A.M. Magazine, Extra Teeth, The London Magazine, Out of Print, and Ambit. Most recent publications include essays in Speculative Nature Writing: An Anthology (Guillemot Press, UK) and Elementals (forthcoming from the Center for Humans and Nature Press, USA). 

Sohini grew up in Barrackpore, India, and studied literature and creative writing at the universities of Delhi, Warwick, and East Anglia, where she received the 2015 Malcolm Bradbury Grant for Poetry. Other honors include a Toto Funds the Arts writing award (2017) and a Vijay Nambisan Sangam House fellowship (2022). She is passionate about interviewing poets, writers, and translators for magazines and newspapers. Currently based out of Bangalore, Sohini is an independent editor and has recently joined the literary translation organization Words Without Borders as the digital magazine’s first poetry editor. She is working on her first novel. 

Her website: sohinibasak.com