Tania James | |
|---|---|
 James at the 2023 Texas Book Festival | |
| Born | 1980 (age 44–45) Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Harvard University (BA) Columbia University (MFA) |
| Genre | Novel |
| Years active | 2009-present |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 1 |
| Website | |
| taniajames | |
Tania Rachel James (born 1980) is anIndian Americannovelist. She is known for her works in novelsAtlas of Unknowns,Aerogrammes,The Tusk That Did the Damage andLoot. She has also written many short stories.
Tania Rachel James was born inChicago, Illinois toIndianMalayaliChristian parents fromKottayam district inKerala,India. Her parents immigrated to the US in 1975.[1] She was raised inLouisville, Kentucky. Her middle name is named after her late maternal grandmother Rachel Kurian.[2] She is the middle sibling of two sisters. She "can understandMalayalam well, and that's it." Her parents were avid readers. According to James, her father has "always been interested in a broad array of writers, fromConan Doyle toCamus toGarcia Marquez, plus he has a wicked comic timing. My mother might be the best storyteller in the family. My older sister writes the loveliest letters (a lost art I think) and my younger sister used to write poetry and stories before she went the medical route."[3]
She likes reading and was inspired to write when she saw how writers "were able to create worlds that seduce a reader and I burned with a desire to do with the readers what the writers had done to me". She enjoyedhorror fiction and writersVictor Hugo,Alexandre Dumas,Ray Bradbury andStephen King as a child.[1] She also read books of Malayalam writersM.T. Vasudevan Nair,Paul Zacharia andO.V. Vijayan in English translation. She also statedThe God of Small Things byArundhati Roy an "incredible book".[3] At age 16, she aspired to become a writer. Speaking toThe Hindu, she said:
"The real ambition to be a writer arrived when I met, for the first time, a living, working writer. I was 16 then and had signed up to attend an arts camp of sorts. Our two teachers were African-American, relatively young and published writers. This was a revelation to me, seeing as how the only writers I’d read in school were (usually) male and white and often dead. In an odd and unspoken way, those two gave me the permission to start thinking about being a writer myself. The path to getting an agent was probably the most difficult aspect. I sent out my work to a handful of agents, and some said yes and some said no. Somehow I managed to get my dream agent; later on, she didn’t tell me she was sending out my work to her editor friends. But it was wonderful to hear that someone had made an offer. I got to celebrate without having had to suffer the anxiety of waiting to hear back."[3]
She graduated fromHarvard University with a BA in filmmaking. She received her Masters of Fine Arts fromColumbia'sSchool of the Arts in 2006.[4][5]
Her first novel,Atlas of Unknowns (Knopf) was published in April 2009. Afamily saga that alternates betweenKerala,India andNew York City, the novel was aSan Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2009 and aNew York Times Editor's Choice.[6]Atlas of Unknowns was shortlisted for theDSC Prize for South Asian Literature. The foreign rights ofAtlas of Unknowns have been sold in eight countries.
Her second book,Aerogrammes (Knopf) was published in May 2012. She has also written several short stories "The Other Gandhi" published inGuernica Magazine. "Girl Marries Ghost" a serialized short story inThe Louisville Courier-Journal. "Hortense", a short story in Five Chapters.[7]
James's novel,The Tusk That Did the Damage was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2015. It was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and longlisted for the Financial Times Oppenheimer Fund Emerging Voices Award. She taught undergraduate and graduate level fiction at theUniversity of Maryland.[1]
In 2023, Knopf published her bookLoot, which begins its tale in India around A.D. 1800. It is a fictional tale about the artists who madeTipu's Sultan Tiger, a famous wooden automaton, shaped as tiger mauling a European soldier. The work of fiction follows a Mysorean wood carver and a French clockmaker who created the tiger and follows them long after Tipu Sultan is killed in a battle with the English.[8]
Tania James lives inWashington, D.C. with her husbandVivek Maru and son. She teaches creative writing at the MFA program atGeorge Mason University.
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