HOW DID WE GET HERE?

A Conversation with Anuja Varghese

ANUJA VARGHESE

(she/her) is an award-winning writer based in Hamilton, Ontario. Her work has appeared in several literary magazines and anthologies, and she is the fiction editor at the Ex-Puritan. In 2023, her short story collection, titled Chrysalis, won the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and in 2024, was long-listed for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Her debut novel, A Kiss of Crimson Ash, the first in a new fantasy trilogy inspired by medieval India, is forthcoming in Spring 2026. Find Anuja online at anujavarghese.com.

TALI VORON-LEIDERMAN: Let’s start from the very beginning with a question I’m sure you get asked often. How did you get started as a writer?

ANUJA VARGHESE: I have been scribbling something pretty much from the time I could hold a writing utensil. If you ask my parents, they’d say I was always in a corner writing, even before I knew how to write. I had pages of my pretend books and notes and letters and things like that. It was always in me to do this. I didn’t start writing more seriously or thinking about writing as a career path until recently. I took English literature at McGill, but that wasn’t focused on creative writing. It was more a survey of all British literature and the CanLit canon–you know, Margaret Atwood and Margaret Laurence, authors like this. I wasn’t really focused on creative writing. I started doing this more seriously pre-pandemic, so not even that long ago.
I still have a full-time job in the non-profit sector, and I was working a mid-management role at a national health charity. I lost that job very suddenly. I came in on a Tuesday, and they called me in, and they said unfortunately, due to some restructuring, your position has been eliminated effective immediately. Go home. What do you do in that moment? You go have a cry in your car; you clean out your desk. But it was that moment of, “Well, now what?” And I think that was the moment when I seriously made the decision to write and to give it a shot. I didn’t know in that moment if anything would come of it. I didn’t know if I would write anything good or if it would get published or anything like that. But I just made a conscious decision to write things and send them out into the world and see what happened. I also started to take more writing workshops, going to more writing events, and meeting more people in the community. I enrolled in the Creative Writing certificate program through the U of T School of Continuing Studies. I also started sending out work to contests and literary magazines. I had a little writing group where we were exchanging things for feedback. There were a lot of rejections. But then, slowly, I started to get some yeses, some early publications, and recognition from contests and things like that.
Eventually I had this little body of stories. I went to a conference with the Writers’ Union of Canada called like BIPOC Writers Connect in its inaugural year in 2019. It was all in-person in Toronto. Emerging writers got paired with a mentor who was an established writer, and my mentor was Farzana Doctor. Farzana looked at two or three of my stories and asked, “Do you think there’s a collection here?” And I said, “Oh … maybe there’s a collection here!” It was the first time I had thought about it. That’s when I started more intentionally putting the collection together.

TVL: That’s really inspiring. You took something really difficult—losing a job is so hard—and you turned it into a brand-new start.

AV: I always say it’s the best shitty thing that happened to me!

TVL: You have been published widely across various literary journals, magazines, and anthologies and your first book was a collection of short stories. What draws you to short fiction?

AV: It’s two things. First, it was a practical decision. The idea of tackling a novel just didn’t feel possible for me at that time. I have kids and a job, and I felt like I couldn’t wrap my head around an entire novel. But I could write and finish and send out a short story. I can write three thousand to five thousand words. In one way it was a practical choice, but also, I do just love short fiction. I love like the economy of language that you get in a good short story. With a novel, it’s like wandering around an expansive house and exploring different rooms. In a short story, you’re just peeking in the window. You get this small glance into a moment of someone’s life. I love what you can accomplish in a great short story.

TVL: In 2023, your debut short story collection, Chrysalis, was published with House of Anansi. Can you share what inspired this collection?

AV: I had a couple of stories that had already been published here and there. I’ll just be honest about this, when I first started writing with the intention of putting together a collection, I was trying to write a CanLit short story collection. I was trying to write these “capital L” literary stories. I had this idea of what was likely to get published, what people wanted to read, and what was likely to get a publisher’s attention. And those stories were not good. They weren’t me. You could feel something not entirely authentic about that work. On the side of the very “serious” literary work, I was also writing the weird stuff: the fantasy, the horror, the witches and demons and magic. Because that’s what’s fun for me to write. And the more I did that and sent that work out, the more I found that’s what people were gravitating toward. At some point I was like, “Oh, this is me. This is what it is.” I had to give myself permission to put those two things together; to say it’s going to have a little bit of literary stuff and it’s going to have a little bit of genre stuff, and it will become something that’s in between all those things. I was very lucky that House of Anansi recognized the collection as genre-blending and was excited about it!

TVL: It also shows that there’s very much an appetite for exactly what you’re writing, and you don’t have to mould your voice or your work to fit any sort of literary box.

AV: I think that’s a real danger now. I hear so many writers talking about writing toward trends. And I’m like, listen, your book’s not going to come out for two years anyway. You don’t know what will be popular then. Write what you’re excited about. Write what means something to you and people will find it.

TVL: After publication, Chrysalis went on to win the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. In 2024, it was long-listed for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and short-listed for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Fiction. This is spectacular, and a true testament to the collection as a powerful debut. How has Chrysalis and its reception shaped your career since then?

AV: It’s wild. I’m not going to say I had low expectations, but I did have realistic expectations for a debut short story collection from a fairly unknown writer. I really hoped that maybe it would get one or two nice reviews and hopefully some people would read it. I think very few writers have any grand expectations, so it was all an incredible surprise. It’s this weird in-between thing of, on one hand, being extremely grateful for the recognition. Some of those prizes came with money–you know, writers aren’t supposed to say they like the money, but the money is nice! So being very grateful for those things, acknowledging that awards and prizes open a lot of doors as a writer, while on the other hand, also acknowledging that writing prizes and art prizes, and prize culture in general is weird and arbitrary. There is no such thing as “the best book.” I don’t think any author or artist necessarily wants to be in competition with anyone else. It’s about acknowledging the truth in both of those things. I’ve sat on a couple of juries myself and you really come to realize how much of what you see on the short-lists and who wins things has very little to do with what is the very best in literature, and a lot more to do with what three or five or ten people can agree on before lunch.
I will say just having that little prize sticker on the cover of your book does make people pick it up. There are so many people who have told me, and I think they mean this in a complimentary way, that they would never have read my book otherwise, but they read all the books on the Governor General’s list, so they picked it up. There were a lot of people who would never have picked up a short story collection, or who say they wouldn’t normally read speculative stuff, that read the book. I think the prize recognition really has opened doors for diverse stories and short stories for all those reasons. I’m very grateful to have those stickers on the cover!

TVL: In May 2026, A Kiss of Crimson Ash, the first book in your romantasy trilogy inspired by Medieval India is slated for release with Penguin Random House Canada. Congratulations! Can you share a little bit about this first book in the Games of the Goddess trilogy?

AV: Imagine a D&D campaign kind of quest with multi-character points of view smashed together with a big Bollywood romance. We have four main characters and a dual magic system. Magic comes up from the ground and down from the sky and the four main characters are harnessed and set loose by a goddess to take down a tyrant king. And that’s just book one!

TVL: Did you always envision the story as a trilogy or a series, or did it f irst start off as one book and you realized it wasn’t enough?

AV: It started out as one book. I started writing it in a Google doc a couple of years ago when Chrysalis was out on submission. I didn’t have an agent at that point, and I had just sent the Chrysalis manuscript to different publishers on my own. I got a few quick no’s and then I was just waiting. I waited for nine months without hearing anything. I was ready to put the thing in a drawer, thinking that nobody wanted it and was trying to write something else to distract myself from the crushing disappointment that nobody wanted my short story collection. I started writing what felt fun for me, which was this big sexy fantasy novel. Basically, it was the novel that I wanted to read. I couldn’t find something that had these three specific things that I was looking for: an epic fantasy, diverse characters—I wanted main characters that looked like me—and higher spice levels. I love the yearning in a slow burn … but if the characters haven’t even kissed by page 200, what are we doing?! I was really looking for those three things together in one book and I couldn’t find it. So, I just started writing it.
It started as a one-off and then I signed with my agent, Hana El Niwairi at Cooke McDermid, who asked if it was a standalone novel or if there was more. Could it be a trilogy? And I said yes, it absolutely could be! That’s when we started talking about what that would look like. I had a draft of book one and outlines of what I thought book two and three in this series could look like. We were able to pitch it as a trilogy with one f inished book and two outlines.

TVL: That’s amazing. I really love the idea of writing the book that you want to read. I know that there are going to be many readers who are going to read your book and say that this is exactly what they were looking for. And how lucky are we to get three books instead of just one! So, what was your approach to writing the trilogy? You mentioned you already have outlines for books two and three.

AV: Book one, A Kiss of Crimson Ash, is done and for book two, I’m about halfway done drafting from a really detailed outline.
You can imagine it as strong scaffolding that’s already there, chapter by chapter. I have a clear idea of what needs to happen in each chapter throughout the book to get each character where they need to be by the end. And then I get to fill all the details in. Sometimes chapters go in a different direction than I had initially thought, or events get switched around. But in general, I’m climbing that scaffolding as I go. For book three, there’s a looser outline at the moment. I still know how the series will end and where we have to get to, but right now, that’s two years away!

TVL: What was it like to move from writing a short story collection to a novel? Did you feel a difference, or did it feel like an extension of the same kind of thing?

AV: You know, for a short story, ten thousand words is long. As a short story writer, you always feel like every word really must carry weight and you’re trying to make every word count. So, at ten thousand words in for the novel, I was like, “Oh, is this too long?” And then realizing you’re only two or three chapters in … and that you’re actually still right at the beginning of the story. There’s so much space, especially within the fantasy genre. I think there’s a little more room than the eighty thousand to ninety thousand words that you would get in most novels. A lot of fantasy is going to be over one hundred thousand words, so it was just making that switch in my mind. There is so much more room to play with, and I could just experiment with what the scope of the story can be. It’s both terrifying and freeing.

TVL: I do want to go back to something you said earlier. You mentioned that you would gravitate toward short fiction because you felt like something shorter was the way to go initially. How did you know that you were ready to tackle a novel?

AV: I didn’t. I absolutely didn’t. And again, it’s very different to write something with zero expectations. A lot of authors are writing something for a deadline or often with a short story, you’re writing it for a contest or to submit it somewhere. But with this, it was just an idea that I had and characters that wouldn’t leave me alone. I was writing into the world with no expectations of what it would be or if I would even finish it. I didn’t know if it would become a novel. I got to about ten thousand or twenty thousand words and I thought, this feels like it’s almost done. This feels long. And then I realized it’s not done at all! There was a shift in scope I had to make for myself.

TVL: As the Games of the Goddess is a romantasy series, I imagine that a lot of world-building must have been required. What was your process for building the world of the series and what was the inspiration behind it?

AV: The inspiration for the world started while my partner and I and some friends were playing D&D. We were playing a campaign in a very Western-centric traditional fantasy world.
I kept wanting to insert an Indian-inspired character and bring in these different cultural things and, it didn’t make sense. It didn’t fit. And I thought, well, fine, I’m going to make a world where it fits. I’m going to make a world that makes sense for this character. The character I was playing in that game was a mage named Bhediya, and there is a Bhediya in the book. So, a little bit of that campaign found its way into the book for sure.
As for world building, it started with me basically trying to write fanfic for my own D&D campaign! But then I started looking at what a bigger story could be based on. I started to research the Vijayanagara Empire, which was a thirteenth to fifteenth-century empire in South India, so a medieval Indian empire, that lasted about 250 years or so. It’s like falling down a rabbit hole. If you google “medieval India,” there is so much to draw on. What food were they eating? What weapons were they using? What were they wearing? What were the palaces like? How were the cities laid out? There’s so much richness. A whole world opened, and I just started pouring it into this book. There’s a lot of that kind of research that went into the world-building, but on the other hand, it is not historical fiction. It’s loosely based on an existing historical empire, but it is very much a fantasy book. I read a lot of fantasy and romantasy and I wanted to make room for magic and divinity and goddesses and demons in the story. I really love the mix of history and fantasy and romance coming together.

TVL: You got me thinking about research rabbit holes, and I always find them so interesting. Do you remember the strangest, weirdest, or most specific kind of research thread that you went down for the book?

AV: My partner is also very into doing this because we were playing the D&D campaign together and we both started researching it. They’re really a stickler for some of the historical stuff. Like, there are a lot of food references in the book. My characters spend a lot of time—I don’t know if I can swear in this interview—but they spend a lot of time eating and fucking in this book. They do some questing and fighting bad guys, but mostly it’s eating and fucking.
So there are a lot of food references, and we spent a lot of time researching them. I had something about potatoes and my partner pointed out there wouldn’t have been potatoes in India at that time. Then we would go through and try to find a good substitute for it. Or similarly, I had a character smoking tobacco and we had to go back and find a substitute. I kept saying, “It’s fantasy, so it’s fine!” But, nope, no potatoes. No tobacco. There were a lot of very specific things like that.

TVL: That makes a lot of sense. Do you have a favourite character that you’ve written? I know that’s a hard question …

AV: That’s like asking if you have a favourite child!

TVL: I know, I know.

AV: Which I think everybody does. We just won’t admit it! I have characters that are close to my heart. I have a story in Chrysalis that’s also in the anthology Queer Little Nightmares called “The Vetala’s Song.” A vetala is a creature from Hindu mythology. It’s kind of like a revenant type of creature, a precursor to the modern vampire, an undead creature that inhabits corpses. So, this story is a cross between a love story and a ghost story, but it’s told from the perspective of the vetala. It’s a nameless character, but she makes this choice to become something monstrous. It doesn’t just happen to her. She chooses to become a monster so that she can remain on earth and wait for her beloved to return. I love this idea of a monster with a tender heart.

TVL: On the other side of things, is there a type of character, plot device, literary technique, or really anything specific you can think of that you will never use in your writing or you actively try to avoid?

AV: My editor did point out that there were a lot of raised eyebrows in my novel! She’s like, “Here’s another ‘he quirked a brow, he raised his eyebrow.’” I had to go back and delete a whole bunch of those. Now, every time I write it, I’m like, nope, nope, nope … delete!

TVL: That’s so funny. What did you end up replacing them with? Or did you just remove them?

AV: Some I removed, but you know, it forced me to go back to the interaction and ask myself what else could someone do? How else could I convey whatever the emotion is? Some I just took out; some I played with in different ways. It’s something I would never have noticed otherwise.

TVL: I’m always curious about beginnings, especially when it comes to how writers start their work. How do you write your opening lines or pages?

AV: You know, almost always, I know the end of a story first. I usually have a very clear idea of what that will be. Even with this trilogy, particularly the first novel, I knew very early on where we would end. For most of my short stories, I also have a clear idea of what that final image, place, feeling, or line of dialogue is and then it’s this exercise of working backward to figure out how did we get there, and what are the events leading to it. The beginning of the story, or whatever the entry point into the story is, changes the most. That is often the last thing I come up with. It really is a process of working backward.

TVL: That’s so interesting. So, you write toward the end already knowing it?

AV: Yeah. And there are so many stories where I’ll go back to revise and I’ll realize it was not the right starting point. I do find, even as an editor when working with other people’s stories, some of the most common feedback I give is: is this the best starting point for the story? Is this where the story really starts?

TVL: Have you ever changed the ending once you finished writing the piece?

AV: I don’t think so. It’d be hard to do, mostly because the story is usually built from the ending. That’s usually the strongest part.

TVL: In addition to being a writer, you’re also a professional grant writer and a fiction editor with The Ex-Puritan Magazine. Has your work as a grant writer and editor shaped or influenced your writing practice?

AV: They both have done so, but in different ways. In my non-profit work, I currently work at the YWCA here in Hamilton where I live, and a lot of the day-to-day work that my team and I are engaged with is how do we empower women, how do we look at the systems that oppress women and girls, and how do we dismantle those things? That day-today work really makes its way into my writing. And I think you can see that in the stories in Chrysalis and you can see that in A Kiss of Crimson Ash for sure. It really is women and people of colour and queer folks and their allies coming together to take down tyrant rulers, and that seems to be particularly resonant right now.

TVL: That’s awesome. You live what you write in that way, too.

AV: Yeah, a little bit. Those things have come together in a cool way. In terms of being the editor at The Ex-Puritan, it’s like I said, a lot of the things that I am now aware of in my own writing, I can notice more and ask of other writers as I’m editing people’s work. There are things that I’m thinking about in my own writing and it’s also some of the most common feedback that I’m giving other people.

TVL: What role would you say literary magazines and journals play in Canada’s publishing industry?

AV: Oh man, they’re so important. They are, I think, overlooked and underfunded. But they’re just such an important platform. I think if you ask almost any Canadian writer, they can tell you that they were first published in a literary magazine, and that they have had a literary magazine editor champion their work. We’re all part of this very small ecosystem in CanLit. Your editor at a magazine might also be an instructor at a university or might also work for a publishing house or a festival or bookseller. Everyone is connected in these different ways. I think literary magazines and the opportunities that they give to emerging writers are so important to keep a healthy and thriving literary scene.

TVL: What are you currently working on?

AV: I’m currently working on book two of the Games of the Goddess trilogy.

TVL: I had a feeling, but I didn’t want to assume, but that’s great! Is there already an expected release date?

AV: We have talked about trying to do it on a one book a year schedule, so we’ll see how that goes. Right now, though, I’m also really excited about the release of A Kiss of Crimson Ash, my debut novel, in May 2026. I hope readers like it and will consider pre-ordering it!

TVL: To wrap up, what is the best piece of advice about writing or otherwise that you have ever received?

AV: I’m paraphrasing here, but I was in a workshop with Silvia Moreno Garcia, and she said, “Writing is not an escalator, it’s a treadmill, so you better learn to walk.” I’ve always thought about that because sometimes it does seem that we only hear about when authors win awards or make bestseller lists. You don’t see that they’ve just been treadmilling for years and years and all the work that goes into it. Sometimes it feels like people are an overnight success, and I think that’s very rarely the case. There’s a lot of walking that you don’t see that writers are always doing in the background. It’s this constant balancing of the writing side, the publicity side, and hopefully, the being-in-community side. They’re all different parts of just staying on the treadmill. I guess it depends how you feel about being on a treadmill! But I feel like that walking can be part of a writing journey as opposed to something that you’re trying to avoid or trying to jump on that escalator as soon as possible. The walk is essential.