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Saras Manickam

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An award-winning writer, Saras Manickam’s story, ‘My Mother Pattu’ won the regional prize for Asia in the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Contest. In 2021, it was included in the anthology, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories, published by Bloomsbury, and in 2022, it was published in The Best of Malaysian Short Fiction in English 2010- 2020. Saras Manickam worked as a teacher, teacher-trainer, copywriter, Business English trainer, copy-editor, and writer of textbooks, school workbooks and coffee-table books while writing short stories at night. Her various work experiences enabled insights into characters, and life experiences, shaping the authenticity which mark her stories. She also won the 2017 DK Dutt Award for her story, ‘Charan’. Some of her other stories have appeared in Silverfish and Readings into Readings anthologies, while one was shortlisted in the 2021 Masters Review Summer Short Story Award. She lives and works in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Books by Saras Manickam

My Mother Pattu

Finely textured, humane and deeply relevant, these stories of love, loss, and the politics of identity, race, and belonging, challenge comfortable conventions about ourselves. In turn wry and humorous, poignant and searing, they haunt our minds long after they are done.

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