Nebula and Ursula K. Le Guin Award winning author Vajra Chandrasekera discusses his writing with Anindita Banerjee, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, and Suman Seth, Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Marie Underhill Noll Professor of the History of Science.

Vajra Chandrasekera is from Colombo, Sri Lanka. His novels The Saint of Bright Doors and Rakesfall have between them won Nebula, Le Guin, Ignyte, Locus, Crawford, and Otherwise awards, been selected as New York Times Notable Books of 2023 and 2024, and been nominated for Dragon and Lamda Awards, among others. He is one of the 2025-2026 Fellows of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. His short stories, poems, and articles have appeared in many publications including Clarkesworld, West Branch, and The Los Angeles Times. He has worked as a fiction editor for Strange Horizons, The Deadlands, and Afterlives: The Year’s Best Death Stories, and as a contest judge for the Dream Foundry and the Salam Award. He is online at vajra.me and probably on whatever social media still exists at the time you’re reading this.

Books will be available for sale and signing after the lecture, from Odyssey Bookstore.