After the Fire

Raised and educated in Jaipur, Vijay Lakshmi went to Yale University as a Senior Fulbright Scholar before she settled down to teach and write in Philadelphia. Her short stories, published in such journals as Wasafiri (London), Orbis (London), Paris Transcontinental (Paris), Amelia (US), have been gathered with a novella as Pomegranate Dreams and Other Stories (Indialog 2002, 2004, 2008). Author of a book, Virginia Woolf as Literary Critic (Heinemman), and several scholarly articles, she writes stories about the psychological conflicts and moral dilemmas of immigrant women settling in western societies. Her collection portrays the alienation and the pathos of the life lived in a contemporary metropolis, whether American, European, or Indian. She has been invited to give readings at universities of Heidelberg, Huelva, Padua, Orleans, and Rajasthan. Recently, Lakshmi was a fellow at the Can Serrat International Centre for Arts in Spain to work on her novel.