Monidipa "Mimi" Mondal is an Indian speculative fiction writer based in New York.[2] She writes in many genres, including science fiction. Mondal is the co-editor of Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, an anthology of letters and essays, which received a Locus Award in 2018.[3] It has been nominated for a 2018 Hugo Award,[4][5] and the William Atheling Jr. Award.[6] Mondal is the first writer from India to have been nominated for the Hugo Award.[5].
Early life
Mondal was born and raised in Kolkata, where her father worked as a West Bengal Civil Services (WBCS) officer and her mother worked at the State Bank of India. Mondal was given the nickname "Mimi" at birth, "like Bengali children usually are," she says in a roundtable interview.[1] From 2015 onwards she has primarily published as "Mimi Mondal" rather than "Monidipa Mondal".[7]
Mondal states in an online essay that her two first languages were Bengali and English.[8] She later learned Hindi, Old English, and small amounts of several other languages.[8]
"I feel like many of us are writing the stories we’d like to see! I would really like to see regional mythology, folklore from India being used in stories.... I would also like to see more traditional performances, and actually uncensored historical research reflected in stories, because so much of Indian history that we know is curated to match the idea of post-British nationalism."[1]
Career
Mondal worked as an editor at Penguin India between 2012 and 2013, and as the poetry and reprint editor of Uncanny Magazine between 2017 and 2018.[14] Her work has appeared in such venues as Tor.com, Uncanny Magazine, Fireside Magazine, The Book Smugglers, Daily Science Fiction, Kindle Magazine, Muse India, Podcastle, and Scroll.[12] Mondal is also a history and publishing scholar with a special interest in South Asian speculative fiction, and wrote a two-part history of South Asian speculative fiction for Tor.com in 2018.[15][16]
Luminescent Threads
Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler is a collection of works by more than 40 writers, issued in honor of the 70th anniversary of Octavia E. Butler's birth.[5] It is Mondal's first book-length work.[17] The anthology was co-edited by Mondal and Alexandra Pierce.[5] It consists of memoirs written as if addressed to Butler personally, mixed with more scholarly essays.[5] The title is derived from Butler's novel Patternmaster.[18]
Luminescent Threads was nominated for the 2018 Hugo Award in the category of Best Related Work,[17] and received the Locus Award for Best Non-fiction on 22 June 2018.[19] It was nominated for a British Fantasy Award.[20] It was also nominated for a 2018 William Atheling Jr. Award for Criticism or Review, an Australian Science Fiction Award, being eligible for its Australian editor Pierce and Australian publisher Twelfth Planet Press.[6]
