Meet the ‘Punk Dalit Girl’ Who Is India’s First Hugo Nominee
Mimi Mondal, who describes herself as ‘punk Dalit girl’ on Twitter, is India’s first nominee for the prestigious Hugo Awards — given annually for the best literary works of science fiction or fantasy — in the Best Related Works category.
Mondal is a New York-based writer of speculative fiction and social justice non-fiction. She is also the poetry and reprint editor of Uncanny Magazine, a science fiction and fantasy magazine which has been nominated twice for the Hugo Awards.
This year, Mondal has been nominated for her co-edited work Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E Butler.
In this book, we collected letters that authors had written to the eminent African-American woman science fiction and fantasy writer, Octavia E Butler. In these letters — we have over forty of them — the authors talk about their own journeys as writers and how Butler’s work has inspired them.Mimi Mondal
Mondal grew up in Kolkata, trained as an editor, and studied in Scotland and New York. In 2015, she received the Octavia E Butler Memorial Scholarship that enables writers of colour to attend one of the Clarion writing workshops, where Butler herself got her start in writing.
As a Dalit woman science fiction writer, Mimi has been pegged to an array of stereotypes.
Mimi’s ‘punk Dalit girl’ persona is a lighthearted but emphatic take on stereotypes in science fiction.
Video Editor: Ashish MacCune
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