The Speculative Literature Foundation has announced the winner of the 2022 A.C. Bose Grant for South Asian Speculative Literature: Mimi Mondal. (You can find her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/monidipa.mondal)

Here’s what they wrote:

This year’s AC Bose Grant winner is Mimi Mondal for her work “Twenty-Nine Days Before Remaking the World.”
Mimi Mondal (she/they) was nominated for the Nebula Award in 2020 for her novelette His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light (Tor.com/Realm.fm). Her debut Dungeons & Dragons adventure, named “In the Mists of Manivarsha” and inspired by Bengal from the 5th-6th century CE, is forthcoming in the book Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel (Wizards of the Coast, June 2022). Her fiction can be found on Strange Horizons, Fireside Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction, Vol. 1 and elsewhere, and her nonfiction column “Extraordinary Alien” on Hindustan Times.

Mimi was born and raised in Kolkata, India, and currently lives in New York City, where she grows hydroponic flowers in the winter, reads (e)books on the grass at public parks in the summer, and takes late-night walks by the East River in all seasons.

“Twenty-Nine Days Before Remaking the World” was originally written in 2019 under the patronage of the Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin, which published the story in German translation by Anke Caroline Burger. The current version of the story is somewhat different from what it was three years ago, and may undergo a few other changes before it appears in Clarkesworld Magazine.

Many congratulations, Mimi!

THE A.C. BOSE GRANT

The A.C. Bose Grant will annually give $1000 to a South Asian / South Asian diaspora writer developing speculative fiction. It supports adult fiction, but work that is also accessible to older children and teens will be given preference in the jury process. The donors hope that this grant will help develop work that will let young people imagine different worlds and possibilities.

​The grant is founded in memory of Ashim Chandra Bose. A.C. Bose, a lover of books, and especially science fiction and fantasy, by his children, Rupa Bose and Gautam Bose, in fond memory and to honor the legacy of the worlds he opened up for them.