M.L. Krishnan originally hails from the coastal shores of Tamil Nadu, India. She is a 2019 graduate of the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop, a 2022 recipient of the Millay Arts Fellowship, a 2022 recipient of the Carnegie Corporation Fellowship, and a 2022-2023 MacDowell Fellow. Her stories and essays have appeared, or are forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Black Warrior Review, Zócalo Public Square, The Offing and elsewhere. Her work has been anthologized in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Wigleaf Top 50, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions and more.
Project Description: M. L. Krishnan will be working on her debut short-story collection that includes nine stories and two novelettes in various stages of completion. Each piece features an irreversible and/or otherworldly physical transformation that centers fear, hunger, desire, shame, myth, or silence. Set in small-town Tamil Nadu, a girl falls into a transgressive relationship with an older woman while navigating strict religio-cultural norms. A woman dates a man who is also a knife. A chorus of girls sate themselves on a train after their own untimely deaths. A band of high-schoolers turn themselves into vetālas—ravenous South Indian ghouls—in order to keep up with shifting gauges of popularity. In each story, characters come to terms with queer longing, ferocious desires, and codified traditions that they are forced to adhere to. Ultimately, this collection is about queer concealment as survival, about lives layered beneath other lives, about the gendered violences of place and caste and colonial hubris.