Chrysalis by Anuja Varghese

2023 Governor General's Literary Award Winner
Finalist, Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2+ Emerging Writers

Genre-blending stories of transformation and belonging that centre women of colour and explore queerness, family, and community.

A couple in a crumbling marriage faces divine intervention. A woman dies in her dreams again and again until she finds salvation in an unexpected source. A teenage misfit discovers a darkness lurking just beyond the borders of her suburban home.

The stories in Chrysalis, Anuja Varghese’s debut collection, are by turns poignant and chilling, blurring the lines between the real world and worlds beyond. Varghese delves fearlessly into complex intersections of family, community, sexuality, and cultural expectation, taking aim at the ways in which racialized women are robbed of power and revelling in the strange and dangerous journeys they undertake to reclaim it.

ANUJA VARGHESE is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Hobart, the Malahat Review, the Fiddlehead, Plenitude Magazine, and others. Her stories have been recognized in the PRISM International Short Fiction Contest and the Alice Munro Festival Short Story Competition and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario. Chrysalis is her first book.