On April 9, Shubha Sunder ’05 was announced as one of the winners of the 2025 Whiting Award.
"It’s a huge honor," Sunder says. "I’m thrilled and humbled to have been selected."
For the past 40 years, the Whiting Foundation has supported creative writing through the awards, which are given annually to 10 emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.
"Beneath the calm surface of Shubha Sunder’s beautifully lucid fiction lies another world of exceptional depth—emotional, psychological, and political," wrote the selection committee. "Sunder's storytelling is confident, her prose charged; it compresses the everyday with the kind of force that renders carbon into jewel. With the steadiness of her gaze and the slow unwinding of story, she draws you in so far that you might as well be one of her characters."
"It was at Bryn Mawr that for the first time in my life I started to dream seriously about becoming a writer of fiction," Sunder says. "I majored in physics and minored in creative writing, and through this dual immersion, I began to cultivate the necessary discipline and tenacity for life as an artist."
Sunder’s debut short story collection, Boomtown Girl, set in her hometown of Bangalore, India, won the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award and was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Story Award and the New American Press Fiction Prize.
Sunder’s stories and essays have appeared in places like Catapult, The Common, New Letters, Crazyhorse, and Narrative Magazine and received notable mentions in Best American Short Stories. She is a 2020 recipient of the City of Boston Artist Fellowship Award and a 2016 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. She teaches creative writing at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Sunder's latest book, Optional Practical Training, was published in March and is the first of a new trilogy of immigrant novels. "The award will allow me the gift of time to work on the sequels," she says.
