Anuja Varghese is a Pushcart-nominated writer whose work appears in Hobart, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, Plenitude Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, So to Speak Journal, Flock Literary Journal, and Corvid Queen: A Journal of Feminist Fairy Tales, among others. Her work has been recognized in the PRISM International Short Fiction Contest, the Pigeon Pages Fiction Contest, and the Alice Munro Festival Short Story Competition. She writes literary fiction, speculative fiction, and erotica/romance - and combinations of all three – where women of color get leading roles!

Anuja has work featured in Best Women’s Erotica Volume 6 (Cleis Press, 2020), When Other People Saw Us, They Saw the Dead, (Haunt Press, 2022), and Queer Little Nightmares (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022). Her debut short story collection titled Chrysalis (House of Anansi, 2023), explores South Asian diaspora experience through a feminist, speculative lens. In 2023, Chrysalis won the Writer’s Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.

Anuja is also a professional grant writer and editor and in 2021, took on the role of Fiction Editor with The Ex-Puritan Magazine. She holds a degree in English Literature from McGill University and a Creative Writing Certificate from the University of Toronto.

Anuja lives in Hamilton, Ontario with her partner, two kids, and two cats.