 Birth—
Where—India
Raised in— USA
Education—
Currently—San Francisco
Bibliography
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Shobha Rao moved to the US from India at the age of seven. She is the winner of the 2014 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, awarded by Nimrod International Journal.
She has been a resident at Hedgebrook and is the recipient of the Elizabeth George Foundation fellowship. Her story “Kavitha and Mustafa” was chosen by TC Boyle for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories 2015.
She lives in San Francisco.
 An Unrestored Woman
Shobha Rao
Shobha Rao’s ambitious collection of stories begins with a preface reminding us about the partition of the Indian subcontinent and the “colossal transfer of people” between the new nations of India and Pakistan. We are informed, too, about the “specific brutalities”, including kidnappings inflicted on women, and the origin of the book’s title. Abducted heroines are familiar to readers of vernacular languages, notably in the work of Amrita Pritam in Punjabi and Jamila Hashmi in Urdu; in English, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man (1988) comes to mind.
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