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Shubha Sunder clinches 2025 Whiting Award
The selection committee said in her lucid fiction lies another world of exceptional depth – emotional, psychological, and political.
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Nandika Chand - Sun, 13, Apr 2025
- 23:42 EDT
- 166
Shubha Sunder / Black Lawrence Press
The Whiting Foundation has announced author Shubha Sunder ’05 as one of the winners of the 2025 Whiting Award on Apr. 9.
The organization supports creative writing through the awards, given annually to 10 emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, for the past 40 years.
The selection committee, in a statement, said in Shubha Sunder’s lucid fiction lies another world of exceptional depth – emotional, psychological, and political. “Sunder’s storytelling is confident, her prose charged; it compresses the everyday with the kind of force that renders carbon into jewel,” it highlighted. “With the steadiness of her gaze and the slow unwinding of story, she draws you in so far that you might as well be one of her characters.”
Congratulations to Shubha Sunder, winner of a 2025 Whiting Award for Fiction! https://t.co/Hvl0D0FRjs pic.twitter.com/iwKIcu0P5R
— Whiting Foundation (@WhitingFdn) April 9, 2025
Sunder described the award as a huge honor. “I’m thrilled and humbled to have been selected.” Sunder, whose debut book ‘Boomtown Girl’ – a short story collection set in her hometown of Bangalore, India, won the 2021 St. Lawrence Book award, shared that it was at Bryn Mawr that for the first time she started to dream seriously about becoming a writer of fiction. “I majored in physics and minored in creative writing, and through this dual immersion, I began to cultivate the necessary discipline and tenacity for life as an artist.”
Sunder’s latest book ‘Optional Practical Training’ was published in March, and is the first of a new trilogy of immigrant novels. “The award will allow me the gift of time to work on the sequel,” she said.
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Sunder’s stories and essays have appeared in places like Catapult, The Common, New Letters, Crazyhorse, and Narrative Magazine and received notable mentions in Best American Short Stories. She is a 2020 recipient of the City of Boston Artist Fellowship Award and a 2016 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. Sunder was also a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Story Award and the New American Press Fiction Prize for her debut short story collection ‘Boomtown Girl’.
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