I have to begin this post by celebrating the authors who submitted their manuscripts and gave us the opportunity to read and become more familiar with their work. There isn’t a single one of you who doesn’t deserve this grant, and I wish that we could work with all of you. Thank you and we wish you all the greatest success in launching your books. I hope, if the opportunity allows, you will consider submitting your next book for one of our future grants.
Malavika Kannan is an exceptional young writer whose debut literary novel, Unprecedented Times, captured the minds and hearts of the team here at Page One. It begins during the fall of 2019 at Stanford University, where Rishika Kumar, a queer, climate activist, has joined the freshman class. You know where I’m going with this if you, like the rest of us, were a conscious human being at the start of 2020. I hope you’ll join us on this journey with Malavika, the Henry Holt team, and our main character, Rishi. It’s going to be a wild ride and you won’t want to miss it!
Malavika Kannan is a Gen Z, Tamil American writer. Across genres, Malavika’s work explores identity, power, kinship, and desire in modern, apocalyptic times. Her debut YA novel, All the Yellow Suns (Little, Brown), is a queer coming-of-(r)age story about activism and identity set in Florida. All the Yellow Suns draws from Malavika’s experiences growing up in Florida amid a crisis of racialized gun violence. At the age of 17, she organized with March for Our Lives, Giffords, and the Women’s March, taking part in the largest American youth protest since the Vietnam War. Malavika graduated from Stanford University in 2024.
Malavika is a frequent writer on race, gender, South Asian identity, and caste. Her reporting appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Emancipator, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Autostraddle, and elsewhere, and you can connect with her on Instagram and TikTok. Her other creative mediums are cartoons—she has a viral comic series, Diary of a Wimpy Mal, about survivorship and identity—and cooking; she’s the co-hosts of Girls Eat Girls, a sapphic supper club in Brooklyn, where she lives and writes.
Please join us in celebrating Malavika, Unprecedented Times, and a world in which diverse voices are elevated and supported equally based on the quality of their work and the substance of their books.
