At my former desk at Penguin Books India, and those are the exact colours we are. (In other words, I strongly abide by the practice of believing a minimum of six impossible things before breakfast.)

​Hello, my name is Monidipa Mondal.​ ​The MLitt in Publishing Studies at the University of Stirling is going to be my second masters degree and I have been sponsored to study here by a Commonwealth Shared Scholarship. I also write a column called ‘Backlisting’ in the Kindle magazine from India (no affiliation with Amazon), in which I take an interesting non-canon book from South Asian writing in English each month, and do a story about it.

Before these things I worked as a copy editor at Penguin Books India in New Delhi and as a multitasking intern at Blaft Publications in Chennai, India. Earlier than that I studied BA and MA at the Department of English, Jadavpur University in Calcutta, India, a place to which I keep returning, also because it’s home. Sometime in between I published a youth literary magazine called Ex Nihilo and another called Kinaara, archived a vintage Bengali sci-fi magazine called Bismoy, wrote some poetry and fiction, and translated a little from Bengali to English.

I like many things, so now I’ll try to make an alphabetical list: aliens, the Beatles, the blues, book history, comics, CSS, dragons, emoticons, Europe, fan fiction, fantasy, freedom of expression, geography, gods (but not Gods), grandmothers’ tales, Indian classical music, the Internet, limericks, magazines, monsters, mountains, mythology, pastiche, percussion, philosophy, Photoshop, poetry, postcolonialism, printing, puns, rhyming, science fiction, South Asian literature, steampunk, superheroes,  translation, travel, tricksters, typography, vampires (more old-school than teenage-romance, though), Victoriana (only the NSFW bits), Western classical music, witches, worldbuilding… and other things.

I occasionally blog at http://julychildren.com/ and very rarely tweet from @Julychildren.