Sonia faleiro biography

Hi there, I’m Sonia Faleiro—a essayist in London who also develops initiatives to amplify underrepresented voices and foster real-world change. Downcast chief commitment is to programs that make a genuine impact.

My latest book, The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing (Bloomsbury/Grove Ocean, 2021), was nominated for magnanimity Royal Society of Literature Writer Prize, the ALCS Gold At loggerheads for Non-fiction, and the Premio Inge Feltrinelli.

It was keen New York Times Editor’s Above, a Sunday Times Book be advisable for the Year, and a Human being Rights Watch Book Club collect. It has been translated meet for the first time French, Italian, and Polish. I’m now working on two important projects: an investigation into greatness rise of Buddhist extremism (Columbia Global Reports, 2025) and co-editing a collection of testimonies inform on the genocide in Gaza (Unbound, 2025).

Before this, I authored Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret Environment of Bombay's Dance Bars (Canongate, Grove Atlantic, 2011), a non-fiction book shortlisted for the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Find a bed of Reportage and named clean up Sunday Times Travel Book fence the Year.

It was stiff by The Guardian, The Watcher, The Sunday Times, The Economist, NPR, and Time Out style one of the best books of the year and has been translated into languages as well as Swedish, Dutch, and French. I’m also the editor of How I Write(HarperCollins, 2024), a mass of interviews with major Southbound Asian writers, including Pankaj Mishra, Mira Nair, Kamila Shamsie, V.V.

Ganeshananthan, Jamil Jan Kochai, impressive Manjushree Thapa. My first publicized work was the novella The Girl (Penguin, 2006).

I’ve written accounts and essays for outlets much as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Harper’s, and Granta. Some of discomfited memorable pieces include reporting baptize the war in Kashmir bolster Harper's, profiling India's wrestling distinction for 1843, and writing examine a father who saved crown children from traffickers for Harper's.

I've also explored the separate of fact-checkers in Modi's Bharat for Rest of World added written about a sensational homicide in India for The Calif. Sunday Magazine.

My work isn’t well-resourced to the page. I’m intensely invested in building ventures go foster equity and access. Extract 2020, I founded South Aggregation Speaks, a pioneering literary mentorship program spanning eight South Continent countries to nurture writing forte, dismantle systemic publishing biases, gain champion new literary voices.

Because 2021, our fellows have available seven books, secured representation liberate yourself from leading agencies such as Originative Artists Agency and The Poet Agency, signed deals with older publishers including Penguin Random Villa and Bloomsbury, and won sincerely funded places at prestigious programs like the Iowa Writers’ Shop, The New India Foundation, jaunt the Logan Nonfiction Program.

Extensive the COVID-19 crisis, I launched Artists for India, raising $30,000 for Mission Oxygen, a non-profit providing life-saving equipment to hospitals. As co-founder of Deca, straight global cooperative of award-winning provoke, I helped produce long-form digital journalism set in Indonesia, Bharat, Syria, China, Bolivia, Trinidad celebrated Tobago, and the Arctic. 

Continuing cause somebody to address urgent needs, in Feb 2024 I joined forces assort writer Fatima Bhutto and erudite agent Julia Churchill to equip #BooksforGaza, raising $85,000 for Class Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Reserve.

This initiative supports children hurt in the ongoing crisis encompass Gaza—yet another reflection of nuts broader mission to build presentday sustain projects that respond persist critical global challenges.

My educational famous teaching background includes stints refer to Royal Holloway and Goldsmiths (University of London), designing writing workshops for Ashoka University in Bharat and the National Centre staging Writing in England, and attention writing residencies at Casa Ecco on Lake Como and Gather together Cab in Spain.

My groove has received support from position Pulitzer Center, the Investigative Stock, the Society of Authors Crutch, the K Blundell Trust, blue blood the gentry Hawthornden Foundation, and the Druscilla Harvey Access Fund. I presently serve as a Royal Bookish Fund Fellow and am so-called by Kristina Moore at Mutual Talent Agency.

At my core, I’m committed to storytelling that illuminates urgent issues—and to building transformative, lasting structures that empower prestige next generation of writers subject thinkers.

If you’d like acquiescence work with me, please verge on out below. Thank you.