Shipra Agarwal

In medical college I was taught to quantify patients’ pain on a scale of 1 to 10. That some pains can’t even be acknowledged, let alone weighed and measured, I'd learned long before. As a writer, I like to exhume such buried pains, air out motheaten desires.

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My characters usually inhabit small towns of India. Similar to the one I grew up in. At the age of eleven, hot, orange poetry began to pour out of me without warning. Stories started when I studied creative writing at Harvard.

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One story from my WIP collection, That Thing We Don't Talk About, has been nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize, 2023. Another was shortlisted for the First Pages Prize, 2022, and was a semifinalist at the IHLR Long Story Contest. My work is published/forthcoming in Witness, Flash Flood, Janus Literary, Bullshit Literary, and an anthology. I am an Authentic Voices Fellow, a SAFTA resident, and a fiction reader at Story.

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You can find me hiking and kayaking in Arizona. My worst shows up to karaoke nights (you've been warned). My best shimmers through my words.

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Read them here >