25+ Indian Authors Who Write Science Fiction, Horror, and Urban Fantasy
While so many “best horror writer” lists are dominated by white and Western authors, there are actually writers all over the world that can also keep you reading late into the night. For example, here’s a list of authors of Indian ancestry—including Kiran Manral, Nalini Singh, Shweta Taneja, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Mainak Dhar, Krishna Udayasankar, and many more. Many of these authors draw from their cultural backgrounds and traditions to write unique science fiction, fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal, and/or horror fiction that are also often uniquely Indian. Scroll down to find out more about these authors, or to find them online.
Kiran Manral
Based in Mumbai, Kiran Manral’s first novel was The Reluctant Detective in 2011. She turned to horror fiction for her fifth novel, The Face at the Window, but the shift in creative direction is not as drastic as it seems: “I’ve always been a great fan of good horror writing in fiction and film,” she told DESIblitz. “I think the inexplicable is always something that has interested me. We live in a world where we experience just one of the dimensions. There are so many more levels of consciousness lying unexplored.” Manral is the founder of India Helps, a network of volunteers who assist disaster victims.
Shweta Taneja
Shweta Taneja regularly voices her passion for Asian, feminist and diverse science fiction and fantasy. A fantasy and science fiction author, comic writer and journalist based in India, her work is described somewhere between feminist, horror, experimental and humorous. She’s written several books and two hundred articles in a career spanning more than a dozen years. Her novels include the Anantya Tantrist Mysteries.
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Tashan Mehta
Mehta’s imaginative The Liar’s Weave is a travelogue though an alternative history of India, weaving reality and SF through constantly shifting prose in which people’s lives revolve around their birth charts.
Nalini Singh
A New Zealand author of Indo-Fijian descent, Nalini Singh has authored numerous urban fantasy and paranormal romance novels. Nalini Singh’s Guild Hunter novels take place in a world where archangels hold sway over both mortals and immortals—with the Guild Hunters caught in between, tasked with retrieving vampires who break contracts with their angelic masters. Nalini Singh is the New York Times and USA Today Bestselling author of the Psy-Changeling, Guild Hunter, and Rock Kiss series.
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Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning and bestselling author, poet, activist and teacher of writing. Her work has been published in more than 50 magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and her writing included in some 50 anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, O.Henry Prize Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.
Her books have been translated into 29 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Bengali, Russian and Japanese; many have been used for campus-wide and city-wide reads. Several of her works have been made into films and plays.
Divakaruni's works are largely set in India and the United States, and often focus on the experiences of South Asian immigrants. She writes for children as well as adults, and has published novels in multiple genres, including fantasy, myth, magical realism, as well as realistic fiction and historical fiction.
Vaishnavi Patel
Vaishnavi Patel is a law student focusing on constitutional law and civil rights. She likes to write at the intersection of Indian myth, feminism, and anti-colonialism. Vaishnavi grew up in and around Chicago and, in her spare time, enjoys activities that are almost stereotypically Midwestern: knitting, ice-skating, drinking hot chocolate, and making hotdish. Kaikeyi is her debut novel.
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Roshani Chokshi
Roshani Chokshi is the author of commercial and critically acclaimed books for middle grade and young adult readers that draws on world mythology and folklore. Her work has been nominated for the Locus and Nebula awards, and has frequently appeared on Best of The Year lists from Barnes and Noble, Forbes, Buzzfeed, and more. Her popular books include Once More Upon a Time: An Enchanting Romantic Fairy Tale, includes The Star-Touched Queen duology, The Gilded Wolves, and Aru Shah and The End of Time, which was recently optioned for film by Paramount Pictures.
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Gautam Bhatia
A Hugo Award-shortlisted senior editor with Strange Horizons, Bhatia’s debut novel is The Wall, which explores the idea of what freedom means in restrictive societies through the eyes of a girl, Mithila, who tries to cross the wall that encloses the futuristic city of Sumer. A Delhi-based architect, writer and artist, he has received several awards for his buildings, and also published books on architecture and satire. His drawings and sculptures have been displayed in galleries in India and abroad.
Ruskin Bond
An Indian author of British descent, Ruskin Bond is considered an icon among Indian writers and children's authors, and a top novelist. He wrote his first novel, The Room on the Roof, when he was seventeen—thr book won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1957. Since then, Bond has written several novellas, more than 500 short stories, as well as various essays and poems, all of which have established him as one of the best-loved and most admired chroniclers of contemporary India. In 1992, India's National Academy of Letters gave Bond the Sahitya Akademi award for English writing, for his short stories collection, Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 for contributions to children's literature.
Priya Sarukkai Chabria
A poet and a writer, Chabria’s 2019 dystopian novel Clone is the story of a 14-generation clone in 24th-century India who struggles against imposed amnesia and sexual taboos in a species-depleted, violent, and highly structured India.
Minakshi Chaudhry
Minakshi Chaudhry, an author and former journalist, is a keen observer of people, cultures, lifestyles, and loves trekking and travelling. She is the author of Ghost Stories of Shimla Hills: The fear of the unknown, enhanced by the mist, darkness and pattering raindrops is part of life in the hills. But there have been real encounters with the supernatural, and included in this collection of chilling tales are personal experiences of people. Minakshi has also authored several other books, including Sunshine: My Encounter with Cancer, Love Stories of Shimla Hills, Whispering Deodars: Writings from Shimla Hills, Destination Himachal: 132 Offbeat and 12 Popular Getaways, 65 Treks and Over 100 Destinations: A Guide to Trekking in Himachal, and Exploring Pangi Himalaya: A World Beyond Civilization.
Neil D’Silva
Neil D’Silva is an Indian author known for his works in the horror genre. Consistently listed among the top horror writers of India, he was named by UK’s DESIblitz magazine among the Top 7 Indian Horror Writers to be read. Neil became a popular name in the horror genre when his debut novel, Maya’s New Husband, became an Amazon India #1 hit in the horror genre immediately after its release in early 2015, and stayed in the top 10 for nearly two years. The book was acquired for a screen production.
Mainak Dhar
The Zombiestan author is a cubicle-dweller by day and writer by night, with more than a dozen books to his credit. He is a bestselling author in his native India with titles published by major houses like Penguin and Random House. One of his novels being made into a major motion picture.
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Jessica Faleiro
Jessica Faleiro’s 2012 novel Afterlife: Ghost stories from Goa is about a Goan family and their ghostly encounters. Her fiction, poetry, essays and travel pieces have been published in Asia Literary Review, Forbes, Indian Quarterly, IndiaCurrents, Coldnoon, Joao Roque Literary Journal, Mascara Literary Review, Muse India, and the Times of India, as well as in various anthologies. Her The Delicate Balance of Little Lives is a collection of interlinked stories about five middle-class Goan women trying to cope with loss. She won the Joao Roque Literary Award ‘Best in Fiction 2017 for her short story “Unmatched.”
Sami Ahmad Khan
A novelist, academic and documentary producer, Sami Ahmad Khan wrote Aliens in Delhi, a near-future imagination of a scenario in which aliens land in Delhi and how India responds to the invasion as half of the citizens turn into hybrids.
Anita Krishan
Anita Krishan’s Ghosts of the Silent Hill: Stories Based on True Hauntings brings to life experiences by the people who witnessed the paraormal. One of the best-selling authors of fiction in India, her books deal with some of the most important issues which affect the contemporary society. Anita Krishan is also a poet and a respected columnist with The Indian Economist.
K. Hari Kumar
Labeled one of the top horror writers of India, K. Hari Kumar has written 50 horror short stories, featured in the book India's Most Haunted. He is a novelist and screenwriter. His books include When Strangers Meet (2013), That Frequent Visitor (2015), A Game of Gods (2016), and The Other Side Of Her (2018). He has penned the story and screenplay for E (Malayalam Movie) and the Hindi language psychological horror web-series Bhram (web series).
Kumar L
One of the few authors writing in what is considered the hard SF genre, Kumar L’s self-published series Earth to Centauri is a thrilling interstellar chase by an Indian spaceship to meet an alien species they contacted.
Lavanya Lakshminnarayan
Run by corporations, city-states in Lakshminarayan’s collection of short stories Analog/Virtual are technocracies where technology and productivity is power. Through various tales she examines technological disparity in a so-called “developed” near-future vision of the subcontinent.
Kuzhali Manickavel
The most esoteric writer in India, Manickavel writes short fiction and chapbooks. She pens strange, quirky fiction that moves between fantasy and surrealism. Her books include short story collections Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them have Wings and Things We Found During the Autopsy.
Varun Thomas Mathew
Mathew’s novel The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay is a dystopia set in a city on the western shores of India where the sea has invaded and citizens live plugged-in lives, explores themes of political freedom and privacy in an era of climate emergency.
Sriramana Muliya
Sriramana Muliya is the author of Frankly Spooking, an unsettling collection of tales that will draw out the fears that lie hidden in the deepest, darkest recesses of your mind. You encounter the dead in places you would never expect: the corridors of a swanky office, a busy shopping mall, a quiet classroom-or may be knocking at your door. Sriramana Muliya has worked as a copy writer, a creative content developer for websites, and a technical writer. He is also an avid movie buff.
Arnab Ray
Arnab Ray is an Indian novelist, blogger and podcaster who currently lives in the United States. His novel The Mine is a 2012 psychological horror novel hailed by IBNLive as a “diabolically smart thriller.” Kanchan Gupta of The Pioneer felt “the weaving of stories into each other, the sequential introduction of characters, five experts who are brought in to investigate bizarre events inside the mine and who in turn confront the evil within them, is the work of a good literary craftsman.”
S.V. Sujatha
Sujatha is a graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme and is currently based in the US. The Demon Hunter of Chottanikara, Sujatha’s debut supernatural thriller, builds upon an Indian folklore of a demon-vanquishing goddess and is one of the few novels set in a village in Kerala.
Krishna Udayasankar
A fantasy writer, Udayasankar has published Beast, an urban fantasy where a female detective is dragged into the terrifying world of werelions post a triple homicide in Mumbai, and Immortal, an urban fantasy based on Ashwathama, an immortal character from Hindu epic of Mahabharata who is a drunken professor solving a mystery.
Achala Upendran
Currently studying in Cinema and Media Studies at USC, Upendran’s debut The Sultanpur Chronicles is a high fantasy where humans have won a war against their supernatural adversaries, the Rakshas, and magic is banned.
Sukanya Venkatraghavan
Venkatraghavan’s debut high fantasy novel Dark Things (2016) is the story of Ardra, a supernatural assassin designed to seduce and kill men, and what happens when she falls in love with one of them. She is also the editor of the critically-acclaimed, women-only anthology of Indian fantasy Magical Women (2019).
Nidhi Upadhyay
Nidhi Upadhyay is an engineer-turned-headhunter. For years, Nidhi spent her days matchmaking senior executives to their dream jobs and her nights reading thrillers, until her husband borderline bullied her into writing one. She lives in Singapore with her doting husband and two exceptionally loving but polar-opposite boys. That Night is her debut novel.
WHAT IS HORROR FICTION
Horror is a sub-genre of speculative fiction intended to frighten, scare, or disgust. Literary historian J. A. Cuddon defined the horror story as "a piece of fiction... which shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing".
WHAT IS URBAN FANTASY
Urban fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy in which the narrative uses supernatural elements in a 19th-century to 21st-century urban society.
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