Mahak Jain

Almost immediately after completing my stay at the Tin House Summer Workshop, I jetted off to Sewanee, Tennessee, for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Three weeks of literary conferencing have been inspiring but also exhausting. So I haven’t had the wherewithal to post the news that I was selected as this year’s Borchardt Scholar at Sewanee! I had the pleasure to meet literary agent Victoria Borchardt, whose agency is responsible for the award. The workshops and lectures and readings have now come to a close and I am headed back home brimful of ideas. It’s been a hectic and exciting literary summer but the experience has been memorable, exciting, and loads of fun. I am ever thankful to the Ontario Arts Council, who made all of this possible.  

I have been sitting on this exciting news for a couple weeks now: I have been accepted to the 2018 Tin House Summer Workshop! The Tin House Summer Workshop is a weeklong intensive of workshops, seminars, panels, and readings led by prominent contemporary writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The program combines morning workshops with afternoon seminars and career panels. Evenings are reserved for author readings, singing, and dancing. From July 8 to July 15, I will be working with author Randa Jarrar on short fiction. I’m grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for making it possible for me to attend the event. It’s going to be an incredible week in Portland, Oregon!

Rebeccah Love recently interviewed me for the Toronto Arts Report website, where I talk about the making of Maya, reading and writing, and living in Montreal versus Toronto. Check it out here. The Toronto Arts Report is a “a blog following the developments of artistic communities relevant to a Toronto audience.” Love is a writer and filmmaker I had the pleasure of meeting while I was in the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA program. It was a pleasure to connect with her over the interview!

Last week, Maya was awarded the South Asia Book Award for Grades 5 and under. Leading to the awards ceremony, I visited the Kalamazoo Public Library and the students at Arcadia Elementary. I loved getting to know the six- and seven-year-olds, many of whom recently immigrated  as refugees or immigrants. The book had a special meaning for them as most picture books feature North American settings and characters who are either white or not human (animals, trucks). It was a reminder how books can touch young hearts in special, indefinable ways.

Yesterday, the South Asia National Outreach Consortium (SANOC) announced that Maya is the winner of the 2017 South Asia Book Award for Grades 5 and Under! I am ecstatic about this news, which connects Maya with libraries and schools across the United States, and more specifically connects the book with young children of the South Asian community. I was once a young child in that community, and except for Tanuja Desai Hidier’s Born Confused, never once read a book for young people that featured South Asian characters, so this is both an award for my young self and for Maya. The South Asia Book Award for Grades 6 and Up went to What Elephants Know by Eric Dinerstein (Disney-Hyperion), a novel about a young elephant driver set in a jungle in the Nepalese Borderlands. And the Honor Books shortlist includes The Boy and the Bindi by fellow Canadian Vivek Shreya! I’ll be heading to Lansing, Michigan, in October for the award ceremony, following a tour of schools and libraries in the area. I look forward to meeting the team that made the award possible!

Andrea Bennett, Editor-in-Chief at Maisonneuve, interviewed me about Maya for the magazine’s blog, where I talk a bit about the relationship between images and text, from the writer’s perspective. Check it out here. Maisonneuve is a very cool Montreal-based magazine. In their own words: “Maisonneuve has been described as a new New Yorker for a younger generation, or as Harper’s meets Vice, or as Vanity Fair without the vanity—but Maisonneuve is its own creature. Maisonneuve‘s purpose is to keep its readers informed, alert, and entertained, and to dissolve artistic borders between regions, countries, languages and genres.” Usually, children’s books are ignored by literary magazines. Here’s to Maisonneuve dissolving artistic borders!