Indu Sundaresan is an American author of Indian origins. She was born and raised in India as a daughter of an Indian Air Force pilot who died in a crash while on duty. The family then moved to Bangalore where she collected books eagerly. She then migrated to the United States for graduate studies at the University of Delaware in economics.
Her short fiction has appeared in The Vincent Brothers Review and on iVillage.com. She lives in the Seattle, Washington area. [1]
Her first novel The Twentieth Wife is about how a young widow named Mehrunissa, daughter of Persian refugees and wife of an Afghan commandwer, becomes Empress of the Mughal Empire under the name of Nur Jahan. Her second novel The Feast of Roses is the sequel to The Twentieth Wife. She is also the author of The Splendor of Silence, historical fiction set in a fictional Indian princely state just before Independence (1947).
Awards
She was awarded the Washington State Book Award for The Twentieth Wife in 2003.