Vauhini Vara

How did you become a writer?

I've been a journalist since high school. Then, I took my first creative-writing class in college, with the writer Adam Johnson, and fell in love with it. I've been writing both nonfiction and fiction ever since.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

My writing influences have always been my writing friends and peers — people like Alice Sola Kim, Anna North, Anthony Ha, Gerardo Herrera, Jenny Zhang, Karan Mahajan, Katie Founds, Sarah Heyward, and Tony Tulathimutte.

When and where do you write?

Whenever and wherever I can. I have a lot of different jobs — teaching, editing, reporting, and writing both nonfiction and fiction — and I'm also a parent. I've never managed to have a consistent schedule, and sometimes months go by and I don't work on a single bit of creative writing. And then, at other times, I'm working on fiction nonstop for weeks. I can write anywhere: at the kitchen table, in the basement, at coffee shops, in bed. 

What are you working on now?

A collection of short stories, This is Salvaged, which comes out in 2023.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

No.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Keep going.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Keep going.

Vauhini Vara is the author of The Immortal King Rao (2022), which Justin Taylor described in the New York Times as “a monumental achievement.” She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her fiction has been honored by the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the O. Henry Prize, and the Canada Council for the Arts. She has also written and edited nonfiction for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the New York Times Magazine; her essay “Ghosts,” published in The Believer, will be anthologized in The Best American Essays 2022. Vara is the secretary for Periplus, a mentorship collective serving writers of color, and a mentor for the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project.