Anuja Varghese is a writer, editor and book reviewer living in Hamilton, Ontario. Varghese earned a degree in English from McGill University and is pursuing a Creative Writing Certificate from the University of Toronto.
Fiction (Short stories)
Chrysalis: Stories
Toronto: Astoria, 2023.
PS8643.A765 C47 2023
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Genre-blending stories of transformation and belonging that centre women of colour and explore queerness, family, and community.
A couple in a crumbling marriage faces divine intervention. A woman dies in her dreams again and again until she finds salvation in an unexpected source. A teenage misfit discovers a darkness lurking just beyond the borders of her suburban home.
The stories in Chrysalis, Anuja Varghese’s debut collection, are by turns poignant and chilling, blurring the lines between the real world and worlds beyond. Varghese delves fearlessly into complex intersections of family, community, sexuality, and cultural expectation, taking aim at the ways in which racialized women are robbed of power and revelling in the strange and dangerous journeys they undertake to reclaim it.
Awards and Honours
2023 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers (Writers’ Trust Canada)(Winner)
2023 Governor General’s Literary Awards–Fiction, English (Winner)
2024 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize–Literary Fiction (Finalist)
Fiction
A Kiss of Crimson Ash
Toronto: Viking, 2026.
Games of the Goddess series ; book 1
forthcoming May 2026
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
Taara, the pious newly crowned Queen of Abhaya, a resource-rich city-state, must marry whether she wishes to or not. Her betrothed is Garjan, Prince of Nandapore, a neighbouring city-state full of secrets and spellcasters. His forbidden love is Bhediya, a courtesan with magic in her blood. And then there is Roland, a thief by trade, attached to nothing and no one, who stumbles into a power-hungry king’s plot to unearth a weapon that has only lived in myth…until now.
Linked by desire, destiny, and a dangerous foe, these four must summon the power of an ancient goddess and chart a course through the empire’s brothels, temples, taverns, and palaces, forcing them to confront the darkest kinds of magic and the truest parts of themselves—before it’s too late.
Locked in a battle that will reshape the empire, they each must decide: What will they risk for a weapon worth dying for, and a love worth life itself?
Anthology (Short stories)
Devouring Tomorrow: Fiction From the Future of Food
Edited by A.G. Pasquella and Jeff Dupuis.
Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2025.
PS8323.F66 D48 2025
Varghese, Anuja. “A View Worth All the Aqua in the World.” In Devouring Tomorrow, ed. by A.G. Pasquella and Jeff Dupuis, 53-65.
Anthology
Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry.
Edited by David Ly and Daniel Zomparelli.
Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022.
E-book (Access restricted to members of the university community)
Varghese, Anuja. “The Vetala’s Song.” In Queer Little Nightmares, ed. by David Ly and Daniel Zomparelli.
Links
Anuja Varghese personal website
Publisher House of Anansi Press, publisher of the Astoria imprint
Publisher Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada