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 publicationby 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.
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
In honor of Father’s Day, writer Dipika Mukherjee remembers her father, Kalidas Mukherjee, who passed away in New Delhi on May 8, 2021....
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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. 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...