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Anjum Hasan is an Indian poet and novelist. She was born in Shillong (Assam), Meghalaya and currently lives in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. Mostly recently, Hasan has written The Cosmopolitans (2015), a novel that deals with art and nostalgia.
Explaining as to the question “Why I became a short story writer?” she says “As a society, we often think of ourselves in terms of the collective; but as a reader and writer of short stories, I am interested in how this form can explore the opposite—human differences and inner lives. I don’t write children’s stories but I particularly like writing from the point of view of children who have high reserves of that ingredient that storytellers cannot do without—imagination. “
Besides the short stories, she wrote novels Neti, Neti (2009) and Lunatic in my Head (2007).
She really is a multifarious and gifted writer. Besides short stories, novels, literary essay and reviews, and political commentary, she has also written a fine collection of poems, Street on the Hill (2006).
She publishes poems, short fiction, essays and reviews in various anthologies and journals.An Indian poet and novelist, Anjum was shortlisted for The Hindu Best Fiction Award in 2010 and The Hindu Literary Prize. She was longlisted for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize.
She is the winner of the Indian Review of Books Award (1994), and the Outlook Picador Non-fiction Contest (2002) for her essay “Shillong, Bob Dylan and Cowboy Boots”
 The Cosmopolitans (2015)
Qayenaat, the protagonist of Anjum Hasan’s new novel The Cosmopolitans, is an unusual woman, and not only for her name. She doesn’t have a surname or a man in her life or even a cat. What she does have are good friends, former boyfriends, a quick intelligence, a rich inner life and a somewhat unfulfilled outer one, and a grand passion for art.
 Difficult Pleasures – Short Stories (2012)
Anjum Hasan’s Difficult Pleasures is a collection of thirteen short stories, set in real places, involving people and feelings we might all have known.
 Neti, Neti – Novel (2009)
Anjum Hasan’s Neti Neti brings Sophie Das from her previous novel, Lunatic In My Head, to Bangalore, gives us a key to her mind and lets us go.
 Lunatic in my Head – Novel(2007)
Firdaus Ansari, Aman Moondy, Sophie Das are dkhars (foreigners/non-tribal persons) in Shillong, though it is the only place they’ve lived in all their lives. Their personal accounts form Lunatic In My Head, a novel about life in Shillong
 Street on the Hill – Poems (2006)
The small town of Shillong, depicted in Anjum Hasan’s poetry collection, Street on the Hill, appears to be a constricting place which limits people’s dreams and aspirations through societal codes of conventions and prescriptive normative ways of behavior.
Sisters – A short story In Granta
The sick and the healthy have nothing in common, thinks Jaan. She’s been dreaming of a solitary man testing nails against wood, but on waking knows there are dozens of men hammering the new world into shape outside, the air dense with the dust they have raised.
Wild Things (A short story from Difficult Pleasures)
Prasad swivels his head to watch a dragonfly that is moving too fast to allow him to fix its colour in his head. It is dazzling blue, but a moment later, transparent silver.
For Love or Water (A short story from Difficult Pleasures)
It was the summer when barefooted women darted between cars at traffic lights, selling tiny plastic flowerpots for the dashboard, each with a pink flower and two bright green plastic leaves that waved their arms with battery-powered regularity.
 SHILLONG, Diwan-e-Khasi
In the Shillong where I grew up, you were what you ate. School tiffin boxes said it all: the Bengalis ate potato chops and sandesh, the Khasis ate rice and meat, the Marwaris ate puri and pickle, the South Indians ate lemon rice or upma, and I, who had been vaguely identified as ‘a Hindi’, had a lunchbox that measured up to this vagueness—macaroni, jam sandwiches or chapati rolls.
 Zac O’ Yeah & Anjum Hasan: Write Love
Writers both, husband and wife share a love of words, a comfortable relationship, and the answer to the secret of his real name
Shillong, Bob Dylan and Cowboy Boots
Every year in Shillong on a grey afternoon towards the end of May, a man in a crisp white shirt walks down to a busy main street in a neighbourhood called Laitumkhraj.
 Why don’t we have more novels about art?
When I set out to write my just-published novel, The Cosmopolitans, which is among other things an attempt at a conversation about art, I tried to reach back in memory to art-driven novels I had read. Michael Frayn’s Headlong was one that immediately came to mind.
 The Disappearing Urban Woman
I’ve been noticing them for some time now — mysteriously masked young girls, often on scooters, sometimes on foot. They fasten scarves around their heads and faces, only anonymous eyes looking out. Others go further, combining the scarf with full-bodied clothes, elbow-length gloves and socks, leaving not an inch of skin visible.
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