About
Parul Kapur was born in an oil town in India’s northeastern jungle and grew up in Connecticut. Her debut novel Inside the Mirror, a story of twin sister artists in 1950s Mumbai, won the Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award and the AWP Prize for the Novel, and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and New American Voices Award. She was named the 2025 Georgia Author of the Year for First Novel. Parul’s short fiction appears in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Wascana Review and more, and she holds an MFA from Columbia University. Loghaven Artists Residency, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Hambidge Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Jentel and Monson Arts have offered her writing fellowships. She has worked as a freelance journalist in Germany and France, and as a press officer at the United Nations in New York. Her articles and critical writing appear in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal Europe, Esquire, ARTnews, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica and The Paris Review. She lives in Atlanta with her family.
Featured Work
INSIDE THE MIRROR
Parul Kapur's debut novel, INSIDE THE MIRROR, is set in 1950s Bombay, India, and centers on twin sisters who aspire to become artists, exploring female creativity and identity-making in a society remaking its own identity in the devastating aftermath of colonial rule.
Jaya Malhotra studies medicine at the direction of her father, who, though a champion of women’s education, assumes the right to choose his twin daughters’ vocations. A talented painter drawn to the city’s dynamic, new modern art movement, Jaya feels compelled to express both the pain and extraordinary life force of a nation recovering from centuries of British oppression. Her twin, Kamlesh, is a passionate student of Bharata Natyam dance who complies with her father’s decision that she become a school teacher.
When Jaya moves out of her family home to live with a female mentor, she suffers grievous consequences as a rare woman in an exclusive domain of male artists. Not only does her departure from home threaten her family’s standing and destroy her reputation, Jaya loses a vital connection to her twin, who pursues her own forbidden dreams by appearing on stage and in the Hindi cinema as a dancer. The twins discover the heavy cost of forging their own destinies in a society that demands women conform to prescribed roles.
A story of two visionary sisters, INSIDE THE MIRROR is a brilliant examination of art, colonialism, injustice, love, and the ambition of women to seize their own power. The novel was informed by Parul Kapur’s experiences as a city reporter at Bombay magazine in the 1980s, where she often wrote on the arts, meeting gallerists and painters who told her about the birth of India's modern art movement in 1947, the same year as Independence. She also reported on stories about the film industry and briefly studied classical Indian dance. She explains, “My varied interests in the arts converged in this story of twin sisters growing up in my parents’ India of the 1950s, each pursuing her art as a private dream until the dream collides with reality and societal disapproval shatters her world.”
As Devi S. Laskar, author of Circa and The Atlas of Reds and Blues notes, “Inside the Mirror is a complex and compelling story of a displaced family living in the shadow of post-Partition India. Parul Kapur has written a gorgeous novel about art, independence and the roots that bind a family together.”
