Meet the ‘punk dalit girl’ who is india’s first hugo nominee

Mimi Mondal, who describes herself as ‘punk Dalit girl’ on Twitter, is India’s first nominee for the prestigious Hugo Awards — given annually for the best literary works of science fiction

or fantasy — in the Best Related Works category. Mondal is a New York-based writer of speculative fiction and social justice non-fiction. She is also the poetry and reprint editor of

_Uncanny Magazine_, a science fiction and fantasy magazine which has been nominated twice for the Hugo Awards. This year, Mondal has been nominated for her co-edited work _Luminescent

Threads: Connections to Octavia E Butler_. > In this book, we collected letters that authors had written to the > eminent African-American woman science fiction and fantasy writer,

> Octavia E Butler. In these letters — we have over forty of them > — the authors talk about their own journeys as writers and how > Butler’s work has inspired them. Mimi Mondal

Mondal grew up in Kolkata, trained as an editor, and studied in Scotland and New York. In 2015, she received the Octavia E Butler Memorial Scholarship that enables writers of colour to

attend one of the Clarion writing workshops, where Butler herself got her start in writing. As a Dalit woman science fiction writer, Mimi has been pegged to an array of stereotypes. > For

 a very long time, it has been impossible to be a writer in > science fiction internationally if you weren’t white, or > especially if you weren’t a white man. Mimi Mondal > Aliens 

always somehow end up in the United States even if they > don’t know what the US is. Completely different universes like > Star Wars or the Middle Earth, which have nothing to do with 

our > world, are inhabited by white people, as if people like us don’t > exist. Mimi Mondal Mimi’s ‘punk Dalit girl’ persona is a lighthearted but emphatic take on stereotypes in

science fiction. > Punk culture came from the working classes. It came up as a > rebellion to the mainstream ‘respectable’ culture. Mimi Mondal > In science fiction, there are the 

sub-genres of Cyberpunk and > Steampunk. What these ‘punk’ suffixes are doing is that they are > telling brave, path-breaking, and subversive stories. As a Dalit > person, this 

sensibility really resonates with me. We have to fight > for our place every day. Mimi Mondal VIDEO EDITOR: Ashish MacCune _(__THE QUINT__ is now on WhatsApp. To receive handpicked

stories on topics you care about, subscribe to our WhatsApp services. Just go to __TheQuint.com/WhatsApp__ and hit Send.)_ Published: 07 May 2018, 2:51 PM IST