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SHORT:

Dipika Mukherjee, PhD, is an award-winning author of fiction and poetry: Shambala Junction, won the UK Virginia Prize for Fiction, and Ode to Broken Things, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Her short story collection is Rules of Desire, and her three poetry collections are the Dialect of Distant Harbors, The Third Glass of Wine, and The Palimpsest of Exile.

GENERAL:

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, and Chicago Quarterly Review, Newsweek, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hemispheres, Orion, Scroll, The Edge and more. Her third poetry collection, Dialect of Distant Harbors, is forthcoming from 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.

INTERNATIONAL:

Dipika Mukherjee is an internationally touring writer and sociolinguist. She has been mentoring Southeast Asian writing for over two decades; in 2015, she founded the D.K Dutt Award for Literary Excellence in Malaysia. She has edited five anthologies of Southeast Asian fiction: Endings and Beginnings Fruit (Word Works, 2018), Bitter Root Sweet Fruit (Word Works, 2017), Champion Fellas (Word Works, 2016), Silverfish New Writing 6 (Silverfish, 2006) and The Merlion and Hibiscus (Penguin, 2002).

Mukherjee’s debut novel, Ode to Broken Things, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and her second novel, Shambala Junction, won the UK Virginia Prize for Fiction. Her short story collection is Rules of Desire (Fixi) and her poetry collections, are the Dialect of Distant Harbors (CavanKerry, 2022) The Third Glass of Wine (Kolkata Writer’s Workshop, 2011), and The Palimpsest of Exile (Rubicon, 2009). A collection of travel essays, tentatively titled Writers Postcards, has been accepted for publication by Penguin Random House (SEA) for 2023.

She was twice nominated for a Pushcart in 2021: for fiction as well as for nonfiction. She is on the curating team and a featured writer in My America: Immigrant and Refugee Writers Today, a popular exhibit at the American Writers Museum in Chicago. Mukherjee teaches at StoryStudio Chicago and at the Graham School at University of Chicago.

She has received grants and fellowships, including an Esteemed Artist Award from the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (USA), Illinois Arts Council Agency (USA), Ragdale Foundation (USA), Faber Foundation (Catalonia), Sacatar (Brazil), Rimbun Dahan (Malaysia), and Gladstone Library (Wales), among others. She featured in the 2018 Lit50: Who Really Books In Chicago, won the Fay Khoo Award for Food+Drink Writing (Malaysia, 2018), and received the Liakoura Prize for Poetry (USA, 2016). She holds a PhD in English (Sociolinguistics) from Texas A&M University. She has taught creative writing in Chicago, Amsterdam, New Delhi, Kolkata, Penang and Kuala Lumpur.

ACADEMIC:

Dr. Dipika Mukherjee is a sociolinguist with interests in Migrant Discourses, Language Shift in Diasporic Communities, and Globalisation and Language and Identity issues among women in the Indian diaspora. Her co-edited book, Language Shifts Among Malaysian Minorities as Effects of National Language Planning: Speaking in Many Tongues was published by the Amsterdam University Press (2011). She has conducted fieldwork on diasporic Indian communities in Malaysia and Amsterdam, and more recently looked into the maintenance of the Shanghai dialect in Shanghai, China.

She has taught in the United States, India, China, Netherlands, Malaysia and Singapore and was Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at Shanghai International Studies University, China, from 2009-2012, Affiliated Fellow of the International Institute of Asian Studies in Leiden, the Netherlands, from 2007-2013, and affiliated to the Roberta Buffet Centre for Global Studies (2013-2020), where she finished an academic manuscript on Women and the Language of Civic Participation in Malaysia.