photo by sarah bodri
“When Winston Churchill was asked to cut arts funding in favour of the war effort, he simply asked, 'then what are we fighting for?'”
― Kazuo Ishiguro
Bio
Mahak Jain writes fiction and poetry for young people and adults. She is the author of three picture books: Maya (illust. by Elly MacKay), winner of the 2017 South Asia Book Award and a Kirkus Best Book of the Year; Bharatanatyam in Ballet Shoes (illust. by Anu Chouhan), nominated for the Forest of Reading Blue Spruce Award and selected as a South Asia Book Award Honor Book; and The Only Astronaut (illust. by Andrea Stegmaier), also available in Portuguese and German and a TD Summer Reading Book selection. Mahak’s debut short story collection, We Are Only Human, is forthcoming from McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House Canada. As well as being an author, she edits children's and adult fiction for several Canadian publishers and is a professor of creative writing at Sheridan College.