Sonia Faleiro

I am a nonfiction author, journalist, professor, and activist in London. I’ve written three books, most recently The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing (Bloomsbury, 2021) which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and was nominated for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje prize. It has been translated into French, Polish and Italian. My earlier book, Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars (Canongate, 2010) was nominated for the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage and named a Sunday Times UK Book of the Year. I’m currently working on a book on the rise of Buddhist extremism (Columbia Global Reports, 2025). My journalism on politics, tech, and human rights appears regularly in the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and Granta.

I led creative writing courses as a professor at Ashoka University in India, and as a guest lecturer at the National Centre for Writing in Norwich. When I’m not writing or teaching, I enjoy building projects that take direct action, encouraging dynamism and diversity in the writing community, and addressing critical topics. In 2014, I co-founded a journalism cooperative to create a new model for funding top-quality longform journalism. The organization, Deca, was profiled by Forbes, which wondered if our model represented ‘the future of journalism’. Deca raised more than $30,000 in Kickstarter funding and one excerpt made the cover of the New York Times Magazine. Our six published books include my investigation into a gang rape in India, 13 Men, which debuted at No. 1 on the Amazon Kindle charts, and was featured on NPR and reviewed in the Guardian.

In 2021, during the worst of India’s covid crisis, I founded Artists for India. I brought together more than seventy writers and artists including Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai and Avni Doshi who donated signed copies of their books in exchange for cash donations to Mission Oxygen, a nonprofit that purchased oxygen concentrators for hospitals and nursing homes in India. I raised $26,000 in one week, sending out 200 signed books and artworks. Later that year, I launched a literary incubator called South Asia Speaks to support emerging voices in South Asia by providing free, one-on-one mentorship for an entire year with an acclaimed author. The organization is now in its fourth year, with over thirty mentors supporting 120 fellows working in fiction, nonfiction, translation, poetry, and reportage. South Asia Speaks recently received 501(c)(3) registration as a US federal tax-exempt nonprofit and is now supported by the Hawthornden Foundation after previously being self-funded. The writer Pankaj Mishra has called it ‘the very best literary mentorship of its kind’. Since 2021, SAS has had over 100 fellows and thirty-five mentors. SAS fellows have so far published five books, received representation from global literary agencies, and been recruited for global writing programs.

My writing has received support from the Pulitzer Centre, The Society of Authors Foundation and K Blundell Trust, the Hawthornden Foundation, and the Drusilla Harvey Access Fund. I have been an RLF Fellow at Goldsmiths University London. I live in South London with my husband, daughter, and Jack Russell terrier.

Sonia Faleiro is the author of  The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing (2021), which was nominated for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-fiction, and the Premio Inge Feltrinelli Award. Her earlier non-fiction book was Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars (2010), which was nominated for the Lettre Ulysses Award for the art of reportage and named a Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year. She is the founder and program director of the literary mentorship, South Asia Speaks.