AAJA NY Presents: Author + Agent In Conversation
Interested in hearing about the publishing industry? Join the Asian American Journalists Association New York Chapter for a chat with author Zara Chowdhary and her agent Anjali Singh on the evening of February 26 at 8 PM Eastern Time on Zoom. They'll talk about how they found each other, what happened on the road to publication, and what has happened since.
Chowdhary is the author of the memoir The Lucky Ones (Crown / Penguin RandomHouse 2024). She recounts a three month period in 2002 in her hometown of Ahmedabad. During this time, she and her family are stuck at home due to widespread anti-Muslim violence.
In February 2002, a train fire claimed the lives of sixty Hindu right wing volunteers and launched the state into a period of mobs and mass killings. Muslim citizens were targeted and killed by their Hindu neighbors. Narendra Modi, the chief of state at the time, was later blamed for fomenting violence.
Chowdhary interweaves intimate remembrances of this time with her family with eyewitness accounts. TIME describes her debut memoir as, “A harrowing survivor’s tale, an important history lesson, and a desperate warning from someone who has seen the tragic effects of ethnic violence.”
The Lucky Ones was named a TIME Magazine Top Ten Best Nonfiction Book of 2024 and a Chicago Review of Books Best Book of 2024.
Anjali Singh founded her own literary agency in 2024. Most recently an agent at Ayesha Pande Literary, she has worked as a literary scout, as an editor at Vintage Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Simon + Schuster and as Editorial Director of Other Press. She is best known for having championed Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis after stumbling across it on a visit to Paris. She has always been drawn to the thrill of discovering new writers and among the literary novelists whose careers she helped launch are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Samantha Hunt, Nawaaz Ahmed and Saleem Haddad. In addition to Zara Chowdhary, her current roster of authors includes memoirists Bridgett Davis, Padma Viswanathan and Tessa Hulls and novelists Susan Abulhawa, Rachel Harper, and Praveen Herat.