ANIL MENON
Author & Editor
ANIL MENON’s most recent work is the novel The Coincidence Plot (Simon & Schuster, 2023). It was preceded by a collection of his speculative short fiction, The Inconceivable Idea Of The Sun: Stories (Hachette, 2022). His novel Half Of What I Say (Bloomsbury, 2015) was shortlisted for the 2016 Hindu Literary Award. Anil’s debut novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet was shortlisted for the 2009 Crossword Prize and the Carl Baxter Society’s Parallax Award.
Anil co-founded the Dum Pukht Writers’ Workshop, the Kolam Writers’ Workshop and is a co-curator for the Literature component of the 2025 Kala Ghoda Arts Festival. He reviews for The Hindu & the fortnightly magazine Frontline. He is the chief editor of The Bombay Literary Magazine. He maintains the substack A Giraffe In Blueprint, and can be reached at iam@anilmenon.com.
I set out to build a website for “Anil Menon, the author”, but am faced with a curious reluctance. For most of my writer friends, composing blurbs, biographical notes and novel synopses are among their least enjoyable aspects of the writing life. A website entails all three aspects and more. In these tasks, one is forced to confront the questions Borges posed in his unclassifiable tract, Borges & I. Who is writing whom into being?
Public life, even those as limited as mine, erodes the few protections we have against turning into reflections. I admit I am the origin of the author in the mirror; that is true. But I am not the author.
Before the website settled on its current shape, so circumspect in its tone and factual in its revelations, it tried out many others. I have restricted the site to one page now. My author is to be found in my stories. Perhaps we shall meet there, as authors and readers have always done: you, listening to the telling, and I, trusting in your ability to complete it.