Vauhini Vara is a writer and editor in Colorado.

She began her journalism career as a technology reporter at the Wall Street Journal and later launched, edited and wrote for the business section of the New Yorker’s website. Since then, she has written and edited for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and she is currently a Businessweek contributing writer. Her journalism has been honored by the Asian American Journalists Association, the International Center for Journalists, the McGraw Center for Business Journalism, and others.

Her latest book is Searches (Pantheon, 2025), is a work of journalism and memoir about how big technology companies are changing our understanding of our selves and our communities; The New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, Esquire and others have named it one of their most anticipated books. Her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao (Norton, 2022), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Her story collection, This is Salvaged (Norton, 2023), was longlisted for The Story Prize and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. For her books, Vara has been longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Award.

Vara is also the author of a play, Ghost Variations — a stage adaptation of her viral essay “Ghosts” — which was selected to be performed as part of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’s 2024 Colorado New Play Summit.

She is a mentor at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project, where six of her mentees have books published or forthcoming with major presses; to learn about mentorship, visit the Book Project’s website.

Vara was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, to Indian immigrants, and grew up there and in suburbs of Oklahoma City and Seattle. She lives in Colorado with her husband, the writer Andrew Altschul, and their son.