Kolkata :

Writer, editor and Jadavpur University alumna Mimi Mondal has been nominated for the 2018 Hugo Awards for co-editing her first science fiction book — the anthology ‘Luminescent Threads’. The 30-year-old, who hails from Kolkata,is the first from the city to be nominated for the top honour in science fiction. Previous Hugo nominees include names like Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Neil Gaiman. Her fellow nominee in the Best Related Works category is the late Ursula K Le Guin.

“I am not an outlier genius. I am completely homegrown and following the path of my elders. Growing up in Kolkata, I read very little purely generic science fiction. And honestly, I taught myself English from a dictionary so I didn’t see people like myself in the worlds written by white, male writers. What I did grow up reading, and this is where we Bengalis have an advantage, was a lot of Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar, Satyajit Ray, Premendra Mitra, Rabindranath Tagore, Narayan Gangopadhyay, Lila Majumdar and Sunil Gangopadhyay… I read them all,” says Mondal, who lives in New York now.

The writer in her emerged in her teens when Mondal studied at Nava Nalanda and then at Calcutta International School. Mondal’s inner editor is unforgiving of her earliest poetry, which she says was ‘of a somewhat middling quality’. “Then I discovered Marquez and Rushdie and Kolkata writer Samit Basu. These completely blew open my mind,” she said.

“I come from a background which made every success in life feel like a little ‘whoop’ to me because nobody in my family had done anything like that. I felt like that when I got into the English department of Jadavpur University in 2007. I don’t think I have stopped,” she says.

Mondal was the Octavia Butler Memorial Scholar at science fiction writing workshop Clarion West in 2015. In strange poetic justice, it is Octavia Butler to whom Mondal’s co-edited anthology pays tribute. “Butler was a number of firsts — the first major African American, queer, woman author of the genre. ‘Luminescent Threads’ is a book about celebrating the triumph of diversity,” Mondal says.

Diversity and inclusion of diverse people remain the writer’s chief concern. Mondal finds herself asserting her Dalit identity to a Western readership “which does not even know what Dalit means”. “I didn’t write from a Dalit sensibility until a few months ago. I am still teaching myself the process. I represent my community by declaring I am Dalit in my author bios and everywhere else.”

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News> City News> Kolkata News / TNN / April 06th, 2018