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Sayantani DasGupta is the New York Times<\/em> bestselling author of the critically acclaimed, Bengali folktale and string theory-inspired Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond books, the first of which\u2014The Serpent\u2019s Secret<\/em>\u2014was a Bank Street Best Book of the Year, a Booklist Best Middle Grade Novel of the 21st Century, and an EB White Read Aloud Honor Book. She is also the author of two other series set in the Kingdom Beyond multiverse, the anticolonial Fire Queen series and the environmentally themed adventures, Secrets of the Sky<\/em>. She is also the author of the forthcoming museum heist and art repatriation adventure Theft of the Ruby Lotus<\/em>, as well as Anika and the Great Dog Rescue<\/em> (a Girl Scouts book), She Persisted: Virginia Apgar<\/em>. She additionally has written two Jane Austen inspired contemporary YA novels, Debating Darcy<\/em> and Rosewood: A Midsummer Meet Cute<\/em>. Sayantani is a pediatrician by training, but now teaches at Columbia University. When she\u2019s not writing or reading, Sayantani spends time watching cooking shows with her trilingual children and protecting her black Labrador retriever Khushi from the many things that scare him, including plastic bags. She\u00a0can be found online at\u00a0sayantanidasgupta.com<\/a> and on both Instagram and TikTok @sayantanidasguptabooks.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The author Toni Morrison says, \u201cIf there\u2019s a book that you want to read, but it hasn\u2019t been written yet, then you must write it.\u201d<\/p>\n When I was growing up in the 1970\u2019s as an Indian immigrant daughter in Ohio, there was no book like The Serpent\u2019s Secret<\/em>. In fact, it usually felt like there was no space, no story, no cultural mirror anywhere that reflected my face and my body and my experience back to me. And, therefore, maybe my face and body and experience weren\u2019t good enough, weren\u2019t worthy, should take up the least amount of space possible, maybe shouldn\u2019t be around at all.<\/p>\n A total bookworm and movie addict, I lost myself in stories. From the Betsy, Tacy <\/em>books to Star Wars, <\/em>my taste was wide. But even then, I ended up wishing for Meg Murry\u2019s all-American family from A Wrinkle in Time <\/em>or Jo March\u2019s auburn hair from Little Women<\/em>. There was always something missing, but it took me years to understand this as a problem with the lack of diversity in the stories I was reading and the movies I was seeing, and NOT a problem with myself.<\/p>\n But when I went on long summer vacations to my grandparents\u2019 homes in Kolkata, India, that\u2019s when I saw that other face of mine \u2013 that other part of me that completed me. That\u2019s when I found myself in my own cultural stories. And if you\u2019ve never experienced it, there\u2019s something amazing about getting off one of those long 20+ hour plane rides, and feeling like you\u2019ve travelled upside down through a wormhole into another universe. Being an immigrant kid returning to India in those days \u2013 before the internet, before my grandparents had TVs or phones, reliable electricity, or, in one case, running water \u2013 was sometimes a little like visiting an alternate dimension, a parallel universe, a galaxy far far away.<\/p>\n Usually in the evenings, when everyone sat on the veranda with tea and snacks, or at night under the whirring fan and the gently swaying mosquito net, my cousins and I would gather and a grandmother would tell us stories from Thakurmar Jhuli<\/em>, or Grandmother\u2019s Satchel, which is a collection of folktales about brave princes and princesses who ride around on flying horses with their bows and arrows, of cruel serpent kings who hoard a wealth of jewels in their underwater kingdoms, of flesh eating, long-taloned, pointy-horned, sharp teethed, rhyming rakkhosh who are the monsters everyone loves to hate.<\/p>\n Some of my favorite stories were those of the half brother princes Lalkamal and Neelkamal who fly about on their winged pakkhiraj horses battling Neel\u2019s rakkhoshi mother, who wants nothing more than to gobble up the fully human Lalkamal. Another of my favorites was about the heroine Kiranmala \u2013 whose name means garland of moonbeams \u2013 whose two over-confident and slightly dumb big brothers go off on an adventure and end up needing to be rescued by their younger sister. I loved these stories so much would end up translating \u2013 with my mom — many into a 1995 collection meant for adults interested in global folktales, The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali Folktales.<\/em><\/p>\n But it wasn\u2019t until many years after that, when I was a mom myself and my son at about 8 or 9 years became a huge Harry Potter and Percy Jackson fan, that I realized that the same problems of representation I\u2019d faced as a kid were still around. Yes, there were more stories about brown kids, immigrant kids, and marginalized kids \u2013 but they were usually serious, realistic books, not fun romps or magical fantasies. And my son only liked books with dashing heroes with hilarious sidekicks who saved the world while cracking jokes and kicking butt. And there wasn\u2019t, at least a few years ago, that many kids that looked like him or his younger sister doing those sorts of things in fantasy books.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s when I had an idea. What if I was to write a story for my fantasy-loving son and his younger sister in which a brown kid \u2013 a brown girl \u2013 was going around being dashing, and having sidekicks, cracking jokes and kicking butt? What if, like the Percy Jackson books, this story was loosely based on the folktales I loved as a kid? What if, instead of going to a real place called India, my heroine\u2019s journey led her into a fantasy land \u2013 the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and Thirteen Rivers \u2013 where a lot of these folktales take place? And that\u2019s very simply how this book was born, as a story in which my own kids could see themselves being brave, dashing, smart, funny, strong and true.<\/p>\n And if the fantasy and fun was for my kids, the space nerdiness \u2013 the wormholes, the black holes, the dark matter, the string theory in this book \u2013 that\u2019s totally for me in honor of my childhood love of Madeline L\u2019Engle. And so, I\u2019m so excited that this book is coming out the same year as Ava DuVernay\u2019s multiculturally cast A Wrinkle in Time, <\/em>it\u2019s like full circle and a dream come true.<\/p>\n I still can\u2019t believe I got not only to write the stories I wanted to read as a little girl, but to share them with readers. I hope you enjoy, and think about writing the stories you want to read too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Short bio (the nitty, the gritty): Sayantani DasGupta is the New York Times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed, Bengali folktale and string theory-inspired Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond books, the first of which\u2014The Serpent\u2019s Secret\u2014was a Bank Street Best Book of the Year, a Booklist Best Middle Grade Novel of the 21st Century, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sayantanidasgupta.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sayantanidasgupta.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sayantanidasgupta.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sayantanidasgupta.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sayantanidasgupta.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/www.sayantanidasgupta.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":556,"href":"http:\/\/www.sayantanidasgupta.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions\/556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sayantanidasgupta.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Long bio (the nittier, the grittier):<\/h3>\n