Tania James


Tania Rachel James is an Indian American novelist. She is known for her works in novels Atlas of Unknowns, Aerogrammes, The Tusk That Did the Damage and Loot. She has also written many short stories.

Early life

Tania Rachel James was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Indian Malayali Christian parents from Kottayam district in Kerala, India. Her parents immigrated to the US in 1975. She was raised in Louisville, Kentucky. Her middle name is named after her late maternal grandmother Rachel Kurian. She is the middle sibling of two sisters. She "can understand Malayalam well, and that's it." Her parents were avid readers. According to James, her father has "always been interested in a broad array of writers, from Conan Doyle to Camus to Garcia Marquez, plus he has a wicked comic timing. My mother might be the best storyteller in the family. My older sister writes the loveliest letters and my younger sister used to write poetry and stories before she went the medical route."
She likes reading and was inspired to write when she saw how writers "were able to create worlds that seduce a reader and I burned with a desire to do with the readers what the writers had done to me". She enjoyed horror fiction and writers Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Ray Bradbury and Stephen King as a child. She also read books of Malayalam writers M.T. Vasudevan Nair, Paul Zacharia and O.V. Vijayan in English translation. She also stated The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy an "incredible book". At age 16, she aspired to become a writer. Speaking to The Hindu, she said:
She graduated from Harvard University with a BA in filmmaking. She received her Masters of Fine Arts from Columbia's School of the Arts in 2006.

Career

Her first novel, Atlas of Unknowns was published in April 2009. A family saga that alternates between Kerala, India and New York City, the novel was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2009 and a New York Times Editor's Choice. Atlas of Unknowns was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. The foreign rights of Atlas of Unknowns have been sold in eight countries.
Her second book, Aerogrammes, was published in May 2012. She has also written several short stories, "The Other Gandhi" published in Guernica Magazine. "Girl Marries Ghost," a serialized short story in The Louisville Courier-Journal. "Hortense", a short story in Five Chapters.
James's novel, The Tusk That Did the Damage was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2015. It was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and longlisted for the Financial Times Oppenheimer Fund Emerging Voices Award. She taught undergraduate and graduate level fiction at the University of Maryland.
In 2023, Knopf published her book Loot, which begins its tale in India around A.D. 1800. It is a fictional tale about the artists who made , a famous wooden automaton, shaped as a tiger mauling a European soldier. The work of fiction follows a Mysorean wood carver and a French clockmaker who created the tiger, and follows them long after Tipu Sultan is killed in a battle with the English.

Personal life

Tania James lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband Vivek Maru and son. She teaches creative writing at the MFA program at George Mason University.

Works

  • Atlas of Unknowns, Knopf, 2009.
  • Aerogrammes, Knopf, 2012.
  • The Tusk That Did the Damage, Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
  • Loot, Knopf, 2023.