The Far Field

Madhuri Vijay was born and raised in Bengaluru and now lives in Hawaii where she teaches children at a school is a schoolteacher. “A fortunate benefit of teaching young children,” she says “is that they neither know nor care about how many words you managed to write that day or whether you’ve hit upon the perfect metaphor — working with them is a refreshing and humbling reminder to keep one’s work in proper perspective.” She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. Her writing has appeared in Best American Non-Required Reading, Narrative Magazine and Salon, among other publications. In 2010, she wrote a short story about a mother and a daughter and a Kashmiri man. “It was a maudlin story—abysmal, really—but I grew interested in writing a novel about Kashmir.” The Far Field is her first book.