Sanjana Thakur won the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for “Aishwarya Rai,” a story that reverses the familiar adoption arrangement: instead of adults choosing a child, a young woman named Avni chooses among potential mothers. Thakur has described longing and loneliness as recurring feelings in her fiction, alongside her interest in mothers and daughters and her connection to Mumbai.
How Thakur won the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize
The Commonwealth Foundation named Thakur the overall winner of the 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for “Aishwarya Rai.” She had first won the Asia regional award. The Foundation reported that she was 26 and from Mumbai, and that she was selected from 7,359 entrants in that prize cycle to receive the £5,000 overall prize. The Commonwealth Foundation’s announcement gives the award details.
What happens in “Aishwarya Rai”
The story imagines adoption in reverse: Avni visits a local shelter and chooses among possible mothers. The candidates differ in qualities including cleanliness and beauty; one resembles the real-life actress Aishwarya Rai. That speculative premise turns the usual parent-child selection into a way to examine family bonds and expectations of motherhood.
Read “Aishwarya Rai” at Granta, where it appears as the 2024 Asia winning entry in partnership with the Commonwealth Foundation.
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Why Aishwarya Rai is central to the story
In a June 30, 2024 interview with Scroll, Thakur explained that Rai serves as a reference for an ideal woman and ideal mother. She connected the actress’s place in the story to broader expectations around beauty, mothers and daughters. This is Thakur’s account of the artistic choice, not a claim about how all readers interpret the character.
The story grew from a different image: Thakur told Scroll that she initially imagined a “Moms R Us” shop, where customers could choose mothers from a shelf based on appearance. As she wrote and revised the piece during her second year in the University of Texas at Austin MFA in Fiction, the idea developed into the story’s shelter and reverse-adoption premise. She described it as a fiction-workshop story rather than a response to a set prompt. Read the full Scroll interview.
Mumbai, distance and recurring feelings
Thakur told Scroll: “Many of my stories are set in Mumbai and the feelings of longing and loneliness infuse a lot of my work.” She said Mumbai remains home even though she has spent much of her life outside India. She misses the city when she is away and finds it changed when she returns. In some stories about Indian characters in the United States, she said, homesickness becomes a more explicit subject.
Her account places the story’s mother-daughter concerns alongside the emotional pull of home and distance. The interview does not quantify loneliness, migration or beauty ideals; these are themes Thakur discusses in relation to her own fiction.
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Books and writers Thakur admires
In the interview, Thakur named writers she admires, including Carmen Maria Machado, Avni Doshi, Arundhati Roy, Danielle Evans, Sabrina Orah Mark, K-Ming Chang and Kiran Desai. She recalled reading and admiring Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss. Her list offers a route into some of the work she has discussed as a reader, rather than a definitive map of influences on “Aishwarya Rai.”
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How Thakur describes her writing routine
Thakur said she tends to work toward deadlines rather than write every day, and that during her MFA she often wrote close to workshop deadlines. She described learning to accept that writers have different habits instead of forcing herself into a daily routine. That is her personal account of process, not a universal prescription for writing.
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At the time of the 2024 interview, Thakur said she was revising an MFA thesis collection of 15 stories, mostly about mothers and daughters and all about Indian people, and hoped to query agents. That interview does not establish whether the collection has since been published.
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