Indian women have been writing, and have been read, for a very long time. From the Bhakti poet-saints like Mirabai and Akka Mahadevi whose songs have survived centuries, to the Urdu short story writers like Ismat Chughtai who wrote with startling boldness in the mid-twentieth century, to the contemporary novelists winning international prizes and reshaping global literary conversation, Indian women’s writing is one of the richest traditions in world literature.
And yet it remains significantly under-read, even within India. This guide is a corrective: a wide-ranging, genuinely useful reading list covering the best books by Indian women across literary fiction, commercial fiction, memoir, poetry, non-fiction, and more.
The most celebrated novel by an Indian woman, and one of the most celebrated novels in any language. The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize in 1997 and has sold millions of copies worldwide. It tells the story of the twin siblings Rahel and Estha in Kerala, and the tragedy that unfolds when love crosses the boundaries imposed by caste and social expectation. Roy’s prose is unlike anyone else’s, lyrical, specific, politically charged, and structured around a devastating sense of what time and society do to people. Her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), takes a panoramic view of contemporary India’s fractures and consolations.
Start with: The God of Small Things, there is simply no substitute for this novel.
Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize in 2006 for this novel set partly in the Himalayan foothills, tracing the life of a retired judge whose granddaughter falls in love with a young man involved in the Gorkhaland independence movement, while his cook’s son navigates illegal immigration in New York. The novel moves between these worlds with emotional intelligence and political precision, examining what colonialism, globalisation, and social aspiration do to ordinary people across generations.
Start with: The Inheritance of Loss
In 2025, Banu Mushtaq became the first Kannada author and the first short story collection to win the International Booker Prize, for Heart Lamp: Selected Stories, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi. The recognition brought long-overdue global attention to Kannada women’s literary writing, a rich tradition that has been producing significant work for decades without the international visibility it deserves. Heart Lamp explores the lives of Muslim women in Karnataka with a directness and emotional range that is genuinely extraordinary.
Start with: Heart Lamp: Selected Stories
Geetanjali Shree’s Ret Samadhi, published in English as Tomb of Sand, translated by Daisy Rockwell, won the International Booker Prize in 2022, becoming the first Hindi novel and the first Indian-language novel to win the prize. An 80-year-old widow’s late-life rebellion against her family’s idea of who she should be becomes a meditation on the borders between countries, genders, and the self. Shree’s prose (in Rockwell’s translation) is experimental, playful, and profound.
Start with: Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi)
Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut story collection, which follows Indian and Indian-American characters navigating the specific dislocations of immigrant life, between cultures, between generations, between the world they came from and the world they are trying to belong to. The Namesake, her first novel, follows a Bengali family across generations in America with even greater scope. Lahiri later learned Italian and began writing in that language, extending her exploration of language and identity into a new dimension.
Start with: The Interpreter of Maladies
Ismat Chughtai is one of the most important Urdu writers of the twentieth century, and one of the bravest. Her short stories, collected in The Quilt and Other Stories and elsewhere, address female sexuality, desire, and the suffocation of women within domestic life with a boldness that got her tried for obscenity by the British colonial government in 1944. The Quilt, her most famous story, is a delicate and daring exploration of female sexuality and the way women’s intimacy is invisible to the men around them. Her prose is sharp, funny, and utterly without sentimentality.
Start with: The Quilt and Other Stories
One of India’s most important political writers in any language or gender, Mahasweta Devi wrote in Bengali about the lives of adivasi communities, bonded labourers, and the dispossessed in a body of work that combined documentary precision with fierce moral passion. Her stories, collected in Breast Stories and Imaginary Maps among others, use the female body as a site of political violence and resistance. Her novel Hajar Churashir Maa (Mother of 1084) about a mother whose son died in the Naxalite uprising is one of the essential texts of Indian political fiction.
Start with: Imaginary Maps (translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) or Hajar Churashir Maa
Kamala Das, who also wrote as Madhavikutty in Malayalam, is one of the most important Indian poets of the twentieth century, and her autobiography, My Story, is one of the most startlingly honest accounts of a woman’s inner life ever written in India. Her confessional poems, collected in The Old Playhouse and Other Poems and Summer in Calcutta, address female desire, marriage, loneliness, and the body with a directness that shocked and thrilled her contemporaries and continues to do so.
Start with: My Story (memoir) or The Old Playhouse and Other Poems
Anita Nair is one of India’s most accomplished and versatile contemporary literary writers. Ladies Coupe, a novel built around six women sharing a train compartment and the stories they tell each other, is warm, sharp, and structurally inventive. Her Inspector Gowda thriller series, beginning with Cut Like Wound, brings the same quality of characterisation to Bengaluru crime fiction. The Better Man is a quieter, more lyrical novel about a man returning to his village after years in the city.
Start with: Ladies Coupe for literary fiction; Cut Like Wound for crime fiction.
Manju Kapur’s literary fiction explores the lives of Indian women navigating desire, marriage, and independence within families and societies that offer them very little room. Difficult Daughters, set around the Partition of India, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and follows Virmati, a young Punjabi woman whose love for a married professor has irreversible consequences. A Married Woman addresses a contemporary woman’s discovery of her own sexuality outside her marriage. Kapur’s writing is clear-eyed, emotionally precise, and refuses easy consolation.
Start with: Difficult Daughters
Meena Kandasamy’s autofictional novel about being in a violent marriage is one of the most important Indian feminist novels of recent decades. The narrator, a young writer who marries an ideologically driven man, documents the systematic dismantling of her identity and the strategies she uses to survive. Kandasamy’s prose is formally bold (the narrator discusses narrative strategies as she deploys them) and politically urgent. The Women’s Prize shortlisting brought it to international attention it fully deserved.
Start with: When I Hit You
Already covered in our mythology section below, but worth listing here as literary fiction too: Divakaruni’s Mahabharata retelling from Draupadi’s perspective is simultaneously one of India’s finest feminist mythological novels and one of its best literary historical fictions.
One of India’s most widely read commercial fiction authors, Preeti Shenoy writes about love, loss, mental health, and reinvention with emotional directness that has found a very large readership. Life is What You Make It, which deals with bipolar disorder within a love story, is her landmark novel. A Hundred Little Flames, set in Kerala and Mumbai, has a quieter, more multigenerational feel. The One You Cannot Have addresses unrequited love with unusual precision.
Start with: Life is What You Make It
Sudha Murty is one of India’s most beloved authors of accessible non-fiction and story collections, books about real people she encountered through decades of philanthropic work with the Infosys Foundation. Wise and Otherwise, her most widely read collection, distils a lifetime of observation about human nature, generosity, and the surprising ways dignity and kindness appear in unlikely places. Her writing is warm, specific, and carries genuine moral weight.
Start with: Wise and Otherwise
Indu Sundaresan’s Taj Mahal Trilogy traces the stories of powerful women in Mughal India, The Twentieth Wife follows Mehrunnisa’s passionate and politically complicated love for Emperor Jahangir, and her eventual rise as Nur Jahan, one of the most powerful women of the Mughal era. Sundaresan blends historical research with the emotional depth of the best romance fiction.
Start with: The Twentieth Wife
Already covered above, the essential starting point for Indian women’s poetry in English.
One of India’s most important English-language poets, de Souza wrote with dark wit and precise observation about the specific experience of Indian Catholic women navigating faith, family, and desire. Fix and Women in Dutch Painting are among her most celebrated collections.
Dharker’s poetry, including Postcards from god and I Speak for the Devil, deals with home, belonging, faith, violence, and the female body with visual precision and emotional intensity. Her work has been widely anthologised in the UK and India.
Anecdote Publishing House‘s own Editor-in-Chief, Mansi Narula Kashyap, is herself an awarded Indian woman author. Her psychological thriller Erika, A Thriller won an award at the Coimbatore Literary Awards Ceremony and became a bestseller on Kindle. Her poetry collection Hiraeth, Home That Never Was, a deeply personal exploration of belonging, loss, and longing, was awarded Best Poetry and Best Debut Book at Aghaaz. Hiraeth takes its title from the Welsh concept of a grief for a home that never was or can never be returned to, and Kashyap’s poems explore the experience of displacement and longing with both precision and emotional depth.
Both books represent the kind of debut Indian women’s writing that deserves more readers than it typically reaches, writing that is literary in ambition, emotionally honest, and rooted in a distinctly Indian experience of the world.
Available through: Anecdote Publishing House
The autobiography of one of India’s greatest poets, written with a frankness that was, and remains, startling. Das writes about her marriage, her desires, her writing life, and her identity with a courage that made her a target of moral outrage and a hero to generations of Indian women writers who came after her.
Deshpande’s novel is narrated by Jaya, a woman who examines her marriage and her own silence within it with unsettling honesty. One of the foundational texts of Indian feminist fiction in English.
Madhuri Vijay’s debut novel, winner of the JCB Prize for Indian Literature, follows a young woman from Bangalore who travels to Kashmir seeking to understand a family secret. It is a novel about guilt, complicity, and the limits of what one person can understand about another’s suffering. One of the finest debut Indian novels of recent years.
Start with: The Far Field
The Mahabharata retold from Draupadi’s perspective, her complicated loves, her political agency, her marginality within a story that is ostensibly about the men around her. Divakaruni’s retelling gives Draupadi an interior life and a voice the original text only glimpses. One of the essential feminist mythological retellings in Indian fiction.
Start with: The Palace of Illusions
Kavitha Kane’s mythology series gives voices to the women at the margins of India’s great epics, Karna’s Wife (Uruvi), Sita’s Sister (Shrutakirti), Menaka’s Choice. These are popular rather than literary retellings, but Kane’s research is solid and her characterisation is sympathetic.
Start with: Karna’s Wife (The Outcast’s Queen)
Already covered above. The most formally ambitious and politically important Indian women’s novel on the subject of domestic violence in recent decades.
A novel structured around the lives of different women, connected by a single event in a small Kerala town. Nair examines how violence, silence, and desire operate in women’s lives with the same precision she brings to her Inspector Gowda series.
One of India’s first YA novels to address LGBTQ+ identity and mental health in school, already covered in our young adult guide but essential here too as one of the important voices in social fiction for young Indian women readers.
Madhuri Vijay, The Far Field (JCB Prize winner) is already a landmark. Whatever she publishes next will be essential reading.
Deepa Bhasthi, The translator of Banu Mushtaq’s International Booker Prize-winning Heart Lamp is herself a significant literary voice whose essays and fiction deserve wider readership.
Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing is a multigenerational, ecologically conscious novel that has attracted significant critical attention and deserves a wider readership.
Avni Doshi, Her debut novel, Burnt Sugar (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020), examines the complex and often toxic relationship between a mother and daughter in Pune with unflinching honesty.
Mansi Narula Kashyap, Anecdote Publishing House’s own Editor-in-Chief and awarded author of the psychological thriller Erika, A Thriller and the poetry collection Hiraeth, Home That Never Was. Both works represent the best of contemporary Indian women’s debut literary writing, precise, honest, and emotionally intelligent.
| Author | Best Known For | Where to Start |
| Arundhati Roy | Literary fiction, political essays | The God of Small Things |
| Kiran Desai | Literary fiction | The Inheritance of Loss |
| Banu Mushtaq | Short fiction in Kannada | Heart Lamp (International Booker 2025) |
| Geetanjali Shree | Literary fiction in Hindi | Tomb of Sand (International Booker 2022) |
| Jhumpa Lahiri | Literary fiction, diaspora | The Interpreter of Maladies |
| Ismat Chughtai | Urdu short fiction | The Quilt and Other Stories |
| Mahasweta Devi | Political fiction in Bengali | Imaginary Maps |
| Kamala Das | Poetry and memoir | My Story |
| Anita Nair | Literary and crime fiction | Ladies Coupe |
| Manju Kapur | Literary women’s fiction | Difficult Daughters |
| Meena Kandasamy | Autofiction, political fiction | When I Hit You |
| Preeti Shenoy | Commercial women’s fiction | Life is What You Make It |
| Sudha Murty | Story collections, non-fiction | Wise and Otherwise |
| Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | Mythology retelling | The Palace of Illusions |
| Madhuri Vijay | Literary fiction | The Far Field |
| Avni Doshi | Literary fiction | Burnt Sugar |
| Mansi Narula Kashyap | Thriller, poetry | Erika, A Thriller; Hiraeth (Anecdote Publishing House) |
Arundhati Roy is the most internationally recognised Indian woman author, The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize and has sold millions of copies worldwide. Within India, Sudha Murty is one of the most widely read authors across age groups, with a vast catalogue of accessible fiction and non-fiction.
Banu Mushtaq won the International Booker Prize in 2025 for Heart Lamp: Selected Stories, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, the first Kannada work and the first short story collection to win the prize. Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand (translated by Daisy Rockwell) won the International Booker Prize in 2022, the first Hindi novel to win. Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize (not International Booker) in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss.
Many of India’s most important women writers work in regional languages. Banu Mushtaq and Vaidehi write in Kannada. Mahasweta Devi wrote in Bengali. Kamala Das wrote in both English and Malayalam (as Madhavikutty). Geetanjali Shree writes in Hindi. Sarah Joseph writes in Malayalam. Many of the most important works of Indian women’s literature are in regional languages and are accessible in English translation.
For literary fiction: Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Geetanjali Shree, Manju Kapur, Anita Nair, Meena Kandasamy, Madhuri Vijay, and Avni Doshi represent the strongest contemporary field. For classics and mid-century writing: Ismat Chughtai, Mahasweta Devi, and Kamala Das are essential.
Preeti Shenoy is the most widely read Indian woman commercial fiction author. Indu Sundaresan writes historical romance set in Mughal India. Anuja Chauhan writes witty, warm romantic comedy. Sudha Murty’s accessible story collections have found an enormous commercial readership.
Yes. Anita Nair’s Inspector Gowda series (beginning with Cut Like Wound) is the strongest Indian women’s crime fiction. Mansi Narula Kashyap’s Erika, A Thriller, published by Anecdote Publishing House, won an award at the Coimbatore Literary Awards Ceremony and became a Kindle bestseller. Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You has strong psychological thriller elements within its autofiction framework.
Major online retailers (Amazon India, Flipkart) carry most Indian women’s books. For titles published by smaller publishers, the publishers’ own websites are often the most reliable source. Anecdote Publishing House’s catalogue, including Mansi Narula Kashyap’s works, is available at anecdotepublishinghouse.com/all-books/.
India’s women writers, in English, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Urdu, Tamil, and every other language on the subcontinent, are producing some of the most powerful and distinctive literature being written anywhere in the world. The best way to find more of it is to read widely, follow literary prizes (particularly the JCB Prize for Indian Literature, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and the International Booker Prize), and seek out the publishers who are actively championing new Indian women’s voices.
Anecdote Publishing House publishes Indian writing across fiction, non-fiction, self-help, romance, thriller, young adult, and spirituality, including works by women authors. Browse our complete catalogue and our authors page to discover new voices.
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