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About Inside the Mirror

Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel

In 1950s Bombay, Jaya Malhotra studies medicine at the direction of her father, a champion of women’s education who assumes the right to choose his daughters’ vocations. A talented painter drawn to the city’s dynamic new modern art movement, Jaya is driven by her desire to express both the pain and extraordinary force of life of a nation rising from the devastation of British rule. Her twin sister, Kamlesh, a passionate student of Bharata Natyam dance, complies with her father’s decision that she become a schoolteacher while secretly pursuing forbidden dreams of dancing onstage and in the movies.

When Jaya moves out of her family home to live with a woman mentor, she suffers grievous consequences as a rare woman in the men’s domain of art. Not only does her departure from home threaten her family’s standing and crush her reputation; Jaya loses a vital connection to Kamlesh.

Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel, Parul Kapur’s Inside the Mirror is set in the aftermath of colonialism, as an impoverished India struggles to remake itself into a modern state. Jaya’s story encompasses art, history, political revolt, love, and women’s ambition to seize their own power.

Parul Kapur was born in Assam, India and raised in the United States. Her fiction appears in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Prime Number, and more. She has contributed articles and reviews to The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal Europe, Esquire, Art in America, Slate, Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review. She was a press officer at the United Nations in New York, and worked as a reporter at the city magazine Bombay in India. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and lives in Atlanta. Inside the Mirror won the AWP Prize for the Novel and is her debut novel.

Sangamithra Iyer is the recipient of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and a Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship for her first book, Governing Bodies, a lyrical reckoning of the ways bodies—human, animal, and water— are controlled and liberated, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. Sangu was an Emerging Writer Fellow at Aspen Summer Words, a finalist for the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature, and a recipient of a Pushcart Prize.  She is the founder of The Literary Animal project, a habitat for conversations and writings about the ways animal lives are portrayed on the page and how we forge a compassionate multi-species world.