‘Longing and loneliness infuse my work’: Sanjana Thakur, 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner

Twenty-six-year-old Sanjana Thakur is the newest winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her story “Aishwarya Rai” was chosen by the jury from a pool of 7,359 entries. In her story, she imagines what “reverse adoption” might look like – that is, a child adopting a mother and therefore, also the nuances of familial bonds, dependence, and beauty and femininity.

A recent graduate of the MFA in Fiction programme at the University of Texas Austin’s New Writers Project, Thakur has always been interested in narratives centred around mothers and daughters. Though she has lived away from India for a little over ten years, her stories are often set in Mumbai or are about Indians in the US.

In a conversation with Scroll, the young writer talked about her growing up years, the ideas and origins of “Aishwarya Rai”, and why she finds the “constraints” of the short story productive.

I’m very interested in the theme of reverse adoption. Tell me a bit about it.
The idea started out pretty differently than how it is in the story now. I was looking at a Toys R Us store and thinking about a store called Moms R Us, where you could buy mothers off the shelf and pick her based on how she...

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