Radhika Iyengar

Author, Journalist

Radhika Iyengar is an award-winning journalist based in Mumbai, who writes on arts and culture, marginalised communities, history and gender.

Her debut non-fiction book, ‘Fire on the Ganges: Life Among the Dead in Banaras’, which chronicles the lives of a community of corpse-burners called the Doms in Banaras, is published by HarperCollins, India (September 2023).

Radhika won the Gaurang River Literary Prize for Best non-Fiction (2024) and the Kalinga Literary Award (Youth) for ‘Fire on the Ganges’. The book has been shortlisted for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize 2024, was longlisted for the AutHer Debut Book Award 2024, and has been an Amazon Bestseller.

‘Fire on the Ganges’ has been touted by Bound India as one of the Best Books of 2023, and was among the Top 10 on The Asian Age’s Bestsellers (Non-Fiction) list in December 2023.

Radhika holds a Master's degree in Journalism from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, New York.

Her work has been published in Al Jazeera, Christian Science Monitor, Atlas Obscura, Netflix, Hyperallergic, Vogue(India), Conde Nast Traveller (India), Platform magazine, Open magazine, Scroll.in, Goya Journal, among other publications.

In 2024, she was invited to be a writer-in-residence at Ahmedabad University in 2024, under the institute’s Ahmedabad Writing Programme. In 2020, Radhika received the prestigious Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship, and was a writer-in-residence at University of Kent, UK. In 2019, through the generous Bianca Pancoat Patton Fellowship, which supports young women writers in India, she became a writer-in-residence at Sangam House Residency, Bengaluru. In 2018, Radhika was awarded the Red Ink award (Human Rights category - Print), and was a recipient of the Sanskriti Prabha Dutt Fellowship (2016).

Radhika has interviewed Grammy-nominated musician Anoushka Shankar, Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, BAFTA-winning director Asif Kapadia, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mira Nair, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Ayad Akhtar, renowned author Hari Kunzru and Magnum photographer Sohrab Hura, among others.

She has been the Culture editor at Mint Lounge, Deputy Editor at Platform magazine, and participated in National Geographic’s Out of Eden program in 2018 (led by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Paul Salopek). In 2019, she was part of the Thomson Reuters Foundation and Pulitzer Center’s joint Land Rights Workshop.

Radhika attended the University of East Anglia’s Creative Writing Program (2013) in India, where she was handpicked and mentored by internationally acclaimed author, Amit Chaudhuri.