Meet Simrita Dhir

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Simrita Dhir. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Simrita below.

Hi Simrita, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

I am an academic and novelist. I lecture on Writing at the University of California, San Diego. I am the author of the novels The Rainbow Acres (2018) and The Song of Distant Bulbuls (2023). I write because I have stories to share. Stories are integral to life. They teach us about ourselves and the world. Stories forge emotional connections, stimulate creativity and imagination. At their best, they change lives. I grew up in a house full of books. My father was a Professor of American Literature and a William Faulkner scholar. My mother was a Professor of Applied Linguistics and also a prolific painter. Both of them manifested a deep love and appreciation for the arts and encouraged my interest in literature, painting, theater, film and music. I was a national-award winning essay writer, debater, and actor in school and college and the recipient of the Gold Standard of the Duke of Edinburgh Award. In college, I majored in English, going on to receive my PhD in American Literature from the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Punjab University, Chandigarh. My PhD supervisor, National Professor Emeritus and Oxford scholar, Dr. Shelley Walia, inspired in me a deeper love for literature and encouraged me to pursue Creative Writing. I went on to study Advanced Rhetoric at the Department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies, San Diego State University, where I did an intensive study of written, spoken and visual language and explored its relationship to knowledge and culture. That laid the foundation for me to write novels.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I think of myself foremost as being a storyteller. I have always felt a deep commitment to stories and cannot imagine a world without them. By connecting the past and the present to the future, stories have the ability to transform lives. Enduring stories are relevant to all times and climes, inculcating an appreciation for diverse cultures, thereby fostering friendship and goodwill. Through history, cultures across the world have striven to tell and preserve their stories. Stories of families and clans, of voyages and migrations, of love and loss, of invasions and conquests have informed our consciousness from time immemorial. I feel stories are the keys to survival. The most powerful stories draw generation after generation of readers to the wisdom and beauty of their timeless messages. As a committed storyteller, I aspire to tell stories that will awaken readers to the universality of anguish and joy. I am a published novelist, engaging with questions of inclusion and decolonization in my fictional works. My novels The Rainbow Acres and The Song of Distant Bulbuls amplify the voices of marginalized groups by presenting a nuanced face of history. Both novels are subaltern narratives, exploring the interplay of dominance and subordination in colonial set-ups and challenging the traditional perspectives that are generally celebrated in historical accounts.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Writing is a very lonely and intense process. It is also time consuming and requires multiple revisions. Having said that, I did not perceive these aspects as difficulties. My novels ‘The Rainbow Acres’ and ‘The Song of Distant Bulbuls’ are labor of love, spun together after much research, multiple revisions and many years. Should I decide to write another story, I am prepared to do all of that over again and gladly so. I feel stories are integral to life, no one tells anyone to write a story. When a story comes to a writer, he/she is driven by a formidable impulse to see the story through completion regardless of all and any obstacles. My advice to aspiring writers is to believe in themselves, put in the effort and tell their stories with honesty and passion. Somedays, it will be hard to set aside time to write because of your work or personal commitments, but you must write every day, even if it is only a few paragraphs. Your story matters and it must be told.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

Below is a list of some of my favorite novels. They have contributed to my understanding of human experience and led me to become the novelist I am today.

2. List your 5 favorite books.
1. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
2. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
3. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
4. Sula by Toni Morrison
5. The Reader by Berhard Schlink

Contact Info:

• Instagram: simrita_dhir
• Facebook: Simrita Dhir