Dipika Mukherjee

Dipika Mukherjee is the author of the novels Shambala Junction and Ode to Broken Things and the story collection Rules of Desire. Her work is included in The Best Small Fictions 2019 and appears in World Literature Today, Asia Literary Review, Del Sol Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Newsweek, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hemispheres, Orion, Scroll, The Edge, and more. Her third poetry book, Dialect of Distant Harbors, was published by CavanKerry Press in October 2022, and a collection of travel essays, Writers Postcards, has been accepted for publication by Penguin Random House (SEA) for 2023. She teaches at StoryStudio Chicago and the Graham School at University of Chicago. She holds a PhD in English (sociolinguistics) from Texas A&M University.

  • A woman clad in red sits with her husband (who is masked) on the ground. On the ground in front of them and mounted behind them on a wall of brightly colored paintings.
    October 17, 2022 | Dipika Mukherjee
    Susama Chitrakar and her husband, Sanjoy. How can a Patua artist like Susama, with a painted paper scroll and a song on her lips, compete with the streaming services providing nonstop ente...
  • Dipika Mukherjee with her father, Kalidas Mukherjee
    June 18, 2021 | Dipika Mukherjee
    Dipika Mukherjee with her father, Kalidas Mukherjee In honor of Father’s Day, writer Dipika Mukherjee remembers her father, Kalidas Mukherjee, who passed away in New Delhi on May 8, 2021....
  • A long exposure photograph of the moon in eclipse
    Autumn 2019
    Dipika Mukherjee
    Photo: Zoltan Tasi / Unsplash A mother’s conflict with her daughter causes her to reflect on Khawnaa, a mathematician-astrologer and light of the Bengali medieval court.  When my daughter...
  • Dipika Mukherjee leans over a railing, smiling, as she looks at the camera
    July 23, 2019 | Dipika Mukherjee
    A writer travels from Chicago to a residency in rural Malaysia, where part of her novel-in-progress is set. While encountering the many living creatures who surround her and making progress on he...
  • A digital altered photograph of Kuala Lumpur shrouded in fog or smog with greys and browns mixed into the haze
    April 16, 2019 | Dipika Mukherjee
    Kuala Lumpur / Photo by Ishan @seefromthesky Although the world has opened up for Malaysian glocal writers in the past fifteen years, they still face the demon of self-censorship....
  • Books from What to Read Now: Malaysia
    September 2016
    Dipika Mukherjee
    The appetite for Malaysian fiction in the English-speaking world seems fixated on family sagas set in the Japanese Occupation of Malaya—stories largely irrelevant to the current sociopolitical challen...
  • Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia
    September 2015
    Dipika Mukherjee
    In this story written in response to current events in Malaysia, a writer confronts the doppelgänger intended to silence her political speech. The Petronas Towers in Malaysia. P...
  • Migrant Workers Poetry Competition
    January 14, 2015 | Dipika Mukherjee
    Dipika Mukherjee reports on the first-ever Migrant Workers Poetry Competition in Singapore, at which construction-site laborers read their poems in November. Rarely is poetry, with its messy...
  • Dipika Mukherjee
    Dipika Mukherjee
    Dipika Mukherjee. Photo by Bobo Lin, Shanghai. Dipika Mukherjee wrote the following poem in response to the August 5, 2012, Sikh gurdwara shooting in Wisconsin.     My name is Simr...

World Literature Today
630 Parrington Oval, Suite 110
Norman, OK 73019-4037
405-325-4531

Updated by World Literature Today: [email protected]