Hi there, I'm Sonia Faleiro, a non-fiction writer based in London. My most recent book, The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing (Bloomsbury/Grove Atlantic 2021), was nominated for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the 2022 ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-fiction, and the 2024 Premio Inge Feltrinelli Award. It was a New York Times Editor's Choice, a Sunday Times Book of the Year, and a Human Rights Watch Book Club selection. The Good Girls has been translated into French, Italian, and Polish.
Earlier, I wrote Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars (Canongate, Grove Atlantic 2011) a non-fiction book nominated for the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage and named a Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year. Beautiful Thing was recognized as a Book of the Year by the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, Economist, NPR, and Time Out, and has been translated into languages including Hindi, Swedish, Dutch, and French.
I'm the editor of How I Write (HarperCollins, 2024), a collection of interviews on craft with major South Asian writers including Pankaj Mishra, Mira Nair, Kamila Shamsie, VV Ganeshananthan, Jamil Jan Kochai and Manjushree Thapa.
My first work was a novella, The Girl (Penguin, 2006).
My writing has been supported by the Royal Literary Fund, the Pulitzer Center, the Investigative Fund, the Society of Authors Foundation, the K Blundell Trust, the Hawthornden Foundation, and the Druscilla Harvey Access Fund.
My reportage and essays appear in The New York Times, Rest of World, The Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Harper's, Granta, 1843, The California Sunday Magazine, and MIT Technology Review. Here are some of my favourites: On the war in Kashmir for Harper's, on India's wrestling superstar for 1843, on the father who rescued his children from child traffickers for Harper's, on the fact checkers taking on Modi's India for Rest of World, and on a sensational murder in India for The California Sunday Magazine.
Outside of writing, I work on projects like the literary mentorship South Asia Speaks which I created in 2020 to support emerging writers. I also created Artists for India, an author-led initiative to raise funds during the covid crisis. The initiative raised $30,000 for Mission Oxygen, a non-profit in India. I'm the co-founder of Deca, a global cooperative of award-winning journalists that created longform journalism for digital platforms. In February 2024, I launched #BooksforGaza alongside writer Fatima Bhutto and literary agent Julia Churchill. We assembled a global coalition of writers to donate signed copies of their books, and raised more than $85,000 for The Ghassan Abu Sittah Children's Fund.
I'm a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and teach creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Previously, I taught at Goldsmiths, University of London, and devised workshops for Ashoka University and the National Centre for Writing.
I am represented by Kristina Moore at United Talent Agency.