Anuja Varghese

My guest on this episode is Anuja Varghese. Anuja is a writer whose debut book, the short-story collection Chrysalis, was published by House of Anansi Press in 2023. That book won the Writers Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and the Hamilton Literary Award for Fiction. It was also nominated for a Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Quill & Quire said that “every piece in Chrysalis is as subtle and punchy as the eponymous final story. Varghese’s women are like her words: brutal, elegant, and resonant."

Anuja and I talk about Hamilton, Ontario’s weirdly tight-knit literary scene, about the manuscript for Chrysalis initially meeting with only rejection and silence from publishers, and about dealing with audiences and readers who have trouble with some of the more graphic material in that book.

This podcast is produced and hosted by Nathan Whitlock, in partnership with The Walrus.

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.