Announcing the Winner of the 2025 A.C. Bose Grant
The Speculative Literature Foundation is pleased to announce that Krushna Dande is the winner of the 2025 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.
Dande’s winning piece is The Keeper of the Ship.
Krushna Dande is a writer, artist, and musician living in New Delhi, India. His academic research on topics such as reading planetary history, death in roguelike videogames, Cold War fantasies of space colonisation, and Jorge Luis Borges have been presented at international conferences in Kolkata, London, and Lisbon. He is currently a PhD scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he researches the relationship between science fiction, conspiracy theory, and esotericism.
He enjoys carrying a sketchbook every day for drawing with friends and strangers. He enjoys the way an idea falls from the sky, still warm from the lathe. He enjoys reading, twitchy and marionette-like, in an unfamiliar language. He enjoys being awash in music until birds stir in the blue dawn. He is writing a novel that he very much hopes you will one day read
