Dipika Mukherjee

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Dipika Mukherjee is the author of the novels Shambala Junction and Ode to Broken Things and the story collection Rules of Desire. Her work is included in The Best Small Fictions 2019 and appears in World Literature Today, Asia Literary Review, Del Sol Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Newsweek, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hemispheres, Orion, Scroll, The Edge, and more. Her third poetry book, Dialect of Distant Harbors, was published by CavanKerry Press in October 2022, and a collection of travel essays, Writers Postcards, has been accepted for publication by Penguin Random House (SEA) for 2023. She teaches at StoryStudio Chicago and the Graham School at University of Chicago. She holds a PhD in English (sociolinguistics) from Texas A&M University.

  • A woman clad in red sits with her husband (who is masked) on the ground. On the ground in front of them and mounted behind them on a wall of brightly colored paintings.

    Singing about the Coronavirus Using an Ancient Art Form: The Patuas of Bengal

    October 17, 2022 Dipika Mukherjee
    Susama Chitrakar and her husband, Sanjoy. How can a Patua artist like Susama, with a painted paper scroll and a song on her lips, compete with the streaming services providing nonstop ent…
  • Dipika Mukherjee with her father, Kalidas Mukherjee

    Tears and Song

    June 18, 2021 Dipika Mukherjee
    Dipika Mukherjee with her father, Kalidas Mukherjee In honor of Father’s Day, writer Dipika Mukherjee remembers her father, Kalidas Mukherjee, who passed away in New Delhi on May 8, 2021.…
  • A long exposure photograph of the moon in eclipse

    The Unsevered Tongue

    Autumn 2019
    Dipika Mukherjee
    Photo: Zoltan Tasi / Unsplash A mother’s conflict with her daughter causes her to reflect on Khawnaa, a mathematician-astrologer and light of the Bengali medieval court.  When my da…
  • Dipika Mukherjee leans over a railing, smiling, as she looks at the camera

    Five Weeks in Rimbun Dahan

    July 23, 2019 Dipika Mukherjee
    A writer travels from Chicago to a residency in rural Malaysia, where part of her novel-in-progress is set. While encountering the many living creatures who surround her and making progress on h…
  • A digital altered photograph of Kuala Lumpur shrouded in fog or smog with greys and browns mixed into the haze

    Malaysian English Writing Today

    April 16, 2019 Dipika Mukherjee
    Kuala Lumpur / Photo by Ishan @seefromthesky Although the world has opened up for Malaysian glocal writers in the past fifteen years, they still face the demon of self-censorship.…
  • Books from What to Read Now: Malaysia

    Four Books from Malaysia

    September 2016
    Dipika Mukherjee
    The appetite for Malaysian fiction in the English-speaking world seems fixated on family sagas set in the Japanese Occupation of Malaya—stories largely irrelevant to the current sociopolitical challen…
  • Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia

    Doppelgänger

    September 2015
    Dipika Mukherjee
    In this story written in response to current events in Malaysia, a writer confronts the doppelgänger intended to silence her political speech. The Petronas Towers in Malaysia…
  • Migrant Workers Poetry Competition

    Do My Poems Cry with Me?

    January 14, 2015 Dipika Mukherjee
    Dipika Mukherjee reports on the first-ever Migrant Workers Poetry Competition in Singapore, at which construction-site laborers read their poems in November. Rarely is poetry, with its messy…