Novelist Sarah Thankam Mathews Shortlisted For National Book Award

India-West News Desk

NEW YORK, NY – Indian American Sarah Thankam Mathews, has been named among the five National Book Award fiction finalists. The National Book Foundation said in a release that the winner will be announced on November 16.

‘All This Could Be Different,’ for which she has been nominated, is the author’s debut novel and is the story of a young, queer Indian immigrant.

“I’m bursting with joy”, she tweeted on hearing that she had been shortlisted and also retweeted the New York Times story making the announcement.

Mathews, who was born in India, grew up in Oman before migrating to the US at 17. A former Rona Jaffe Fellow in fiction at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Margins Fellow at The Asian American Writers workshop, she is a recipient of the Best American Short Stories 2020 award.

The other finalists are Tess Gunty (The Rabbit Hutch), Gayl Jones (The Birdcatcher), Jamil Jan Kochai (The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories) and Alejandro Varela (The Town of Babylon) are the other fiction nominees.