Sanjena Sathian

Sanjena Sathian is the author of the critically acclaimed novels, Goddess Complex (2025) and Gold Diggers (2021), both published by Penguin Press. Goddess Complex was named a top anticipated book of the year by TIME and has been named a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Gold Diggers was named a Top 10 Best Book of 2021 by the Washington Post and long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. It won the Townsend Prize for Fiction.

Sanjena’s short fiction appears in The Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, Conjunctions, One Story, 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 also writes for screen.

She has received support from Hedgebrook, the Hawthornden Foundation, the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, and the Clarion Foundation. She is an alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught fiction at Emory University, Mercer University, the University of Iowa, and Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. She lives in Hong Kong and will teach at the University of Hong Kong in spring 2026.