Background

Meera Nair was born in 1963, in India. She is a daughter of a journalist.

Education

Meera Nair earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Punjab University in 1983. She immigrated to the United States in 1997 to study creative writing. She got a Master of Arts in Post-colonial Literature from Temple University in 1999, and a Master of Fine Arts from New York University in 2001.

Career

As a master's student at New York University, Meera Nair was a New York Times Fellow. Now she teaches creative writing at New York University and at Brooklyn College. Her teaching and research interests include fiction and non-fiction writing; Asian-American and post-colonial literature; South Asian history and politics. She is also a contributor to periodicals and journals, including the New York Times Magazine, Threepenny Review, and Calyx.

Meera Nair's first published book is a collection of stories called Video. The story Video is about an Indian couple whose marriage flounders after the husband sees a pornographic film and asks his wife to engage in a sexual act performed on the video. According to an article in Book, Nair developed this story after reading a newspaper article about Western pornography's effect on Indian villagers. Another of the stories in the collection was generated after former president Bill Clinton visited India. In A Warm Welcome to the President. Insh'Allah!, the residents of a small village in Bangladesh build a new toilet so that it will be available should the president desire to use it. There are ten stories in all, with some taking place in India and others in the United States. In Curry Leaf Tree, Dilip, who left his village to take a job with Motorola in Arizona, acquires a wife through an arranged marriage but is disappointed when she sheds their traditions for American ways. Dilip, who has an extraordinary sense of smell, is also unfortunate in that his new wife is unable to cook.

In Sculptor of Sands, a young man makes incredible artistic progress after finding the body of a young woman buried on a beach. In Summer, a young girl who is sexually molested by a cousin can no longer play the part of the princess in the family play. The fifteen-year-old-boy of My Grandfather Dreams of Fences watches helplessly as his grandfather is exploited. Carlin Romano of the Philadelphia Inquirer compared Nair's work with that of successful Indian authors Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) and Jhumpa Lahiri (Interpreter of Maladies) and the Indian writers who followed them, saying that Video "shares the pluses and minuses of much Indian/Indian American fiction." USA Today's Whitney Matheson said that Nair "creates passionate, distinctive characters, establishing herself as a writer to watch. From The Sculptor of Sands, a timeless fable, to the more modem Curry Leaf Tree, her work pulsates with captivating, varied subject matter that all types of readers can appreciate."

Achievements

• Meera Nair's debut stories collection, Video, won the Asian-American Literary Award and was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, the Editor's Choice book at the San Francisco Chronicle, and a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book. Her short story, Video, which is the title story of her first collection, was the winner of the 2000 PEN /Amazon.com short story contest, but the honor was almost immediately withdrawn when it was discovered that Nair had published another story in the Threepenny Review. Because that journal has a circulation over 5,000, Nair was deemed ineligible under the conditions of the contest, but she was allowed to keep the prize money. Her stories, articles, and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, in anthologies, and on National Public Radio's Selected Shorts, among other places. She has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Video

    (The ten exquisitely crafted stories in Video introduce a ...)

    2002
  • Maya in a Mess

    (Maya has finally become a monitor! But oh no! She's lost ...)

    2019
  • Maya Saves the Day

    (An escaped tiger. Lost parents. Puppies who need a home. ...)

    2017

Views

According to Meera Nair, she doesn't like a lot of Indian writers who exploit India in horrible ways - who make it very exotic, who talk about her long black hair, her long lashed-eyes, and the lake that was her navel. She takes strong exception to that because she thinks it does a disservice really. Nair thinks the country has bad and good, and people should be talking about it as it is: not exoticizing it and pandering really to the West.

Connections

Meera Nair married a journalist in 2000. They have a daughter.