The Speculative Literature Foundation is pleased to announce that Vineetha Mokkil is the winner of the 2024 A.C. Bose Grant.

In 2019, the Speculative Literature Foundation and DesiLit co-sponsored the A.C. Bose Grant in memory of Ashim Chandra Bose, a lover of books—especially science fiction and fantasy. Bose’s children, Rupa Bose and Gautam Bose, founded the grant to honor the legacy of the worlds their father opened up for them. The donors hope that this grant will help develop work that will let young people imagine different worlds and possibilities. 

Mokki’s winning piece is No One Has To Know and Other Stories. Our jurors called it “excellently composed” and said its “concept was articulated elegantly and perceptively.”

Vineetha Mokkil is the author of the short story collection, A Happy Place and Other Stories (HarperCollins). Her new collection, Lawrence of Arabia and Other Stories is forthcoming from Hawakal Publishers. Her work has appeared in the anthologies The Best Asian Short Stories 2018 (Kitaab, Singapore), The Punch Magazine Anthology of New Writing (Niyogi Books, New Delhi), and Things Left and Found at the Side of the Road (Ad Hoc Fiction, UK). Her stories have been published in the Santa Fe Writers’ Project Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Fictive Dream, Barren magazine, The Bombay Review, and Asian Cha among other journals. Poems translated by her from Malayalam to English have been published in Indian Love Poems (ed. Meena Alexander, Everyman’s Library, USA). The flash fiction collection, Lightning Strikes: An Anthology of Flash Fiction by Fifty Indian Writers (Dhauli Books), edited and introduced by her, was published in 2024. Mokkil was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2019 and shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award. Her journalistic writing has appeared in The Hindu, Outlook, The Times of India, Open, and Asian Review of Books. She is currently based in New Delhi, India.