Vauhini Vara is a writer — a journalist, editor, fiction writer, essayist, and playwright — 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, her writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, and elsewhere. She is a Businessweek contributing writer and can sometimes be found working as a story editor at the New York Times Magazine.

Her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao (Norton, 2022), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Publications that named it a notable book of the year include NPR and The New York Times, where Justin Taylor called it “a monumental achievement.” Her story collection, This is Salvaged (Norton, 2023), was longlisted for The Story Prize and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and named by The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, and others as a notable book of the year. A nonfiction book, Searches (Pantheon, 2025), will be published in April 2025.

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

Vara has given lectures and readings at the Chautauqua Institute, the New York State Writers Institute, and the Jaipur Literature Festival, as well as at Stanford University, Princeton University, the Ohio State University, and many other institutions.

Her journalism has been honored by the Asian American Journalists Association, the South Asian Journalists Association, the International Center for Journalists, the McGraw Center for Business Journalism, the International Journalists’ Programmes, and the National Association of Real Estate Editors. Her fiction has received an O. Henry Award, as well as honors from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Hedgebrook. Her creative nonfiction has been honored by the Best American Essays series and the Canada Council for the Arts.

She is a mentor at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project and was a founding mentor for Periplus, a collective mentoring writers of color; to apply for mentorship, visit the Book Project’s website. She sits on the board of the Krishna D. Vara Foundation, which awards an annual scholarship to a graduating high-school student at Mercer Island High School in memory of her sister, Krishna Vara.

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