We are thrilled to announce that Shambala Junction by Dipika Mukherjee has won this year’s Virginia Prize. The Virginia Prize is dedicated to women writing fiction in English from around 
the world.
The judges were unanimous in selecting this novel which they felt dealt with a serious subject in an imaginative way.
There were around 100 entries from all over the world and the standard of entries was particularly high. We hope to be able to develop the other shortlisted titles towards publication too!
Dipika Mukherjee holds a doctorate in English (Sociolinguistics) from Texas A&M University. She has taught language and linguistic courses in China, India, the Netherlands, United States, Malaysia, and Singapore for the past eighteen years. She now teaches Sociolinguistics at Northwestern University and is Faculty Affiliate at the Equality Development and Globalization Studies (EDGS), Roberta Buffett Centre for International and Comparative Studies. Her debut novel Thunder Demons (Gyaana, 2011) is based on the current socio-political situation in Malaysia and was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Thunder Demons will be republished by Repeater Press (UK) in Summer 2016 as Ode to Broken Things and distributed by Random House in America. Her short story collection, Rules of Desire, was published in November 2015 (Kuala Lumpur: Fixi). She has edited two anthologies of Southeast Asian short stories: Silverfish New Writing 6 (Silverfish, 2006) and The Merlion and Hibiscus (Penguin, 2002). Her poetry collections include The Third Glass of Wine (Writer’s Workshop, 2015) and The Palimpsest of Exile (Rubicon Press, 2009). She is Contributing Editor of Jaggery (A Desilit Arts and Literature Journal) and the Chicago Quarterly Review, as well as a founding member at Asia Pacific Writers & Translators. She curates an Asian/American Reading Series for the Guild Literary Complex, Chicago.