Skip to main content

Sanjena Sathian

Biography

Sanjena Sathian

Sanjena Sathian is the author of the critically acclaimed novel GOLD DIGGERS, which was named a Top 10 Best Book of 2021 by the Washington Post and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. It won the Townsend Prize for Fiction. Her short fiction appears in The Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, Conjunctions, One Story, Boulevard and more. She’s written nonfiction for The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Drift, The Yale Review and NewYorker.com, among other outlets. She’s an alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught at Emory University, the University of Iowa, and Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. In spring 2025, she will serve as the Ferrol A. Sams Jr. Distinguished Chair of English at Mercer University. GODDESS COMPLEX is her second novel.

Sanjena Sathian

Books by Sanjena Sathian

by Sanjena Sathian - Fiction

Sanjana Satyananda is trying to recover her life. It’s been a year since she walked out on her husband, a struggling actor named Killian, at a commune in India, after a disagreement about whether to have children. Now, Sanjana is struggling to resurrect her busted anthropology dissertation and crashing at her annoyingly perfect sister’s while her well-adjusted peers obsess over marriages, mortgages and motherhood. Sanjana needs to move forward --- and finalize her divorce ASAP. There’s just one problem: Killian is missing. As Sanjana tries to track him down, she’s bombarded with unnerving calls from women seeking her advice on pregnancy and fertility. Soon, Sanjana comes face to face with what her life might have been if she’d chosen parenthood. And the road not taken turns out to be wilder, stranger and more tempting than she imagined.

by Sanjena Sathian - Fiction, Magical Realism

A floundering second-generation teenager growing up in the Bush-era Atlanta suburbs, Neil Narayan is funny and smart but struggles to bear the weight of expectations of his family and their Asian American enclave. He tries to want their version of success, but mostly, Neil just wants his neighbor across the cul-de-sac, Anita Dayal. When he discovers that Anita is the beneficiary of an ancient, alchemical potion made from stolen gold --- a “lemonade” that harnesses the ambition of the gold’s original owner --- Neil sees his chance to get ahead. But events spiral into a tragedy that rips their community apart. Years later in the Bay Area, Neil still bristles against his community's expectations --- and finds he might need one more hit of that lemonade, no matter the cost.