Parul Kapur Wins $25,000 Pattis Family Foundation Book Award

Photos: Vino Wong

India-West Staff Reporter

NEW YORK, NY – In a year crowded with notable debuts, Parul Kapur’s ‘Inside the Mirror’ has quietly emerged as one of the celebrated literary novels of 2025, earning the Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award and placing its author among a growing list of writers to watch.

Announced in Interlochen, Michigan, the honor comes with a $25,000 cash prize and a writer in residence appointment at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, a setting long associated with nurturing creative talent.

Born in Assam and raised in the United States, Kapur brings a transnational perspective to her fiction.

‘Inside the Mirror,’ published in March 2024 by the University of Nebraska Press, is set in Bombay in the 1950s, a decade shaped by both optimism and upheaval in the years following Indian Independence. At its center are twin sisters bound by family and tradition but driven by different artistic callings, one to painting and the other to classical dance. As the city and the nation around them shift under the weight of social change, the sisters navigate ambition, loyalty, and the limits imposed on women seeking creative freedom in a transforming society.

The novel’s careful rendering of its historical moment has been central to its reception. In announcing the Pattis Family Foundation award, selection committee chair Eric Blackburn said the judges were struck by the book’s accomplished approach to historical setting and its insistence on the centrality of artistic expression to individuals, communities, and even nations.

The novel has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist, while The Atlanta Journal Constitution praised it as packed with rich characters and attuned to the shifting cultural landscape of post Independence India.

As part of the award, Kapur will spend three days in April 2026 as writer in residence at the Interlochen Arts Academy. Interlochen President Trey Devey said the residency offers young writers and artists an opportunity to see how creative ideas are developed and refined into finished literary work, a process Kapur herself has navigated with notable success.

Kapur holds a master of fine arts degree from Columbia University and lives in Atlanta.