Parul Kapur is a novelist, journalist, and literary critic. She was born in an oil town in northeastern India and took her first plane ride out of the Upper Assam jungle at eleven days old. She spent her early childhood between Bombay, Calcutta, and New Delhi, and immigrated to the United States with her family when she was seven. Parul graduated from Wesleyan University with a degree in English and holds an MFA from Columbia University. She has worked as a press officer at the United Nations in New York, and an editor at Travel & Leisure.

She returned to India briefly in the 1980s to work as a reporter at the city magazine Bombay, writing about culture, arts and society. Painters and gallerists she met there offered their first-hand accounts of the birth of India’s modern art movement in 1947, the same year as Independence. Inside the Mirror, which is inspired by her encounters with art world figures in Bombay, won the AWP Prize for the Novel and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press on March 1, 2024.

Parul’s short fiction centers on the aftermath of colonialism in India and the lives of Indian immigrants. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Wascana Review, Prime Number, Midway Journal, and the anthology {Ex}tinguished & {Ex}tinct. As a journalist and critic, she has written for The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ARTnews, Art in America, Guernica, Slate, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review. She spent a decade in Germany, France, and England, contributing articles and reviews to The Wall Street Journal Europe and New York Newsday. Parul founded the Books page at ArtsATL, Atlanta’s leading online arts publication, and headed literary coverage there for several years. The Hambidge Center, Jentel, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts have awarded her writing fellowships. She lives in Atlanta.