Parul Kapur '89 has won the Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award for her debut novel, Inside The Mirror (University of Nebraska Press, 2024). The $25,000 prize recognizes the "best literature in the creative arts field."
Inside The Mirror tells the story of twin sisters Jaya and Kamlesh Malhotra, living in 1950s Bombay as they strive to become artists in a society that denies women the freedom to shape their own lives. The work has previously been awarded the Georgia Author of the Year for First Novel Award, and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the New American Voices Award.
The judges of the Interlochen competition "agreed that no book better captured the spirit of the award or left a more memorable mark on us as readers than Inside the Mirror by Parul Kapur. The committee praised the novel's success at the level of character and narrative, its accomplished approach to historical setting–Bombay (present-day Mumbai) in the 1950s–and its insistence on the centrality of artistic expression both to individuals as well as to communities and nations. It is a genuinely remarkable book."
The Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award offers important recognition and support for its writers. Kapur shared, "My immense gratitude to the Pattis Family Foundation for this amazing $25,000 prize and to the Interlochen Center for the Arts, where I will be writer in residence next April."
Kapur is a fiction writer and arts journalist. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal Europe, Esquire, Slate, and Guernica. Her fiction has been published in Frank, Wascana Review, Prime Number, and the anthology {Ex}tinguished & {Ex}tinct.
