In 2019, we made it our goal is to work with as many debut authors as possible and to spread the word about their debut novels. It was such a success last year that we decided to continue the fun for years to come! Follow us this year as we pick the minds of the 2021 debuts and chat with them about their writing process and what it's like to be a new author. Also stay tuned for news of giveaways, Twitter chats, and more!
At the end of 2020, we Tweeted about wanting to discover more debut authors and their books. We ended up finding Anuradha D. Rajurkar and her novel AMERICAN BETIYA, and we have been interested in it ever since! We are so excited to have Anuradha on the blog today to answer some of our questions!
Anuradha D. Rajurkar is the SCBWI Emerging Voices Award-winning author of AMERICAN BETIYA, a contemporary young adult debut novel to be published March 9, 2021 by Knopf/Penguin Random House. It's a story of a teen artist's forbidden interracial love, her close-knit immigrant family, and her boyfriend's desperate desire to fit into her Indian culture--even if it means betrayal. Holding two degrees from Northwestern University, Anuradha spends her free time hiking the shores of Lake Michigan with her family, cooking Indian food, and obsessing over her next book, garden, or interior design project. A lazy knitter, passionate reader, and color-enthusiast, Anuradha lives in Wisconsin with her husband and two sons.
The Book Bratz: First of all, congratulations! How does it feel to be a debut author?
Anuradha: Thank you so much! Honestly, I feel thrilled, proud, and terrified all at once. It’s amazing to think that this story I’d conceived loosely back when I was a teen is completed, edited, and soon-to-be published by Knopf. It’s so humbling, and I am beyond grateful to be at this point.
The Book Bratz: In your opinion, what's the best part of the writing process? What's the hardest?
Anuradha: The best part of the writing process is the first draft writing of scenes. I work off a barebones outline, but so many layers are revealed about the characters in the actual writing of these early scenes. There is almost always a series of surprises to me while drafting at this stage, when my characters go from a conceptual sketch to what feel like actual people. These people’s thoughts and actions begin to reveal something important—something I don’t always fully realize quite yet. It’s during this early drafting that often my characters’ motivations come into sharper focus, so that I then return to my outline to reconfigure things and create new pieces that fit the puzzle of the picture. It’s a process that still feels wholly mysterious. The hardest part of the writing process for me is the final pass pages, which is the stage in the editing process just before the book goes to print. This is the stage when you can make minute changes such as swapping out a single word for another, but no splicing, dicing, or rewriting any sections—it’s too late for any of that! This is the dreaded point when you have to take a deep breath, remind yourself that you’ve revised many many times and so has your editing team, and that you are now at the point when THIS IS IT. That relentless aim for perfection ends here, and accepting that can feel scary. :)
The Book Bratz: Where did you get the idea for AMERICAN BETIYA?
Anuradha: American Betiya was the story I needed as a South Asian American born and raised in the Midwest. The story came from my own need to explore love, culture, the immigrant experience, empowering female friendships and the impact they all have when negotiating one’s own identity. These were just some of the issues my friends and I navigated in some form, and are the same ones that teens today continue to navigate. I used this contemporary fictional space to delve deeply into how sexuality, cultural taboos and expectations, and racism and patriarchy all play into our sense of self as young women growing up in America.
The Book Bratz: Who was your favorite character to write? Who was the most difficult?
Anuradha: My favorite character to write was my main character, Rani. She inspires me in how ambitious and clear her career aspirations are—I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but didn’t have the confidence to go for it in earnest until this story banged down the door of my heart over many years, demanding to be written. Though Rani seems to have her act together in the beginning of the story, she has for so long yearned for love, ached for the bliss of being seen and feeling special. The nuances in her character—including her ability to overlook elements of her first love that could be potentially damaging—were exciting to write: She’s a real girl, making choices that are filled with compromise as a first generation South Asian American, and whose empathetic nature means she longs to see the best in people. I loved her funny, searching voice, and found her to be so loveable. Oliver was by far the most difficult character to write. In the beginning of the story, he comes from a place of being genuinely intrigued by Rani and her culture. He wants to be a part of it in not wholly objectionable ways aside from a few microaggressions (which, let’s face it, is quite routine for many of us). The challenge was to create a character in him that is layered, where we see how Rani might fall for him, while also showing the slow progression of his needs that lead Rani to compromise her very identity.
The Book Bratz: Are there any other books or authors who give you inspiration for your own writing?
Anuradha: Absolutely. The book that first inspired me to become a writer when I was around 22 is James Baldwin’s Another Country. Until then, I didn’t know books could go that deep into a psyche via narration and pitch-perfect dialogue, while handling issues of sexuality, race, and social justice with such amazing grace. I have also long admired stories by Arundhati Roy, Colum McCann, Alice Munro, and Jhumpa Lahiri for their tightly woven prose. In terms of young adult fiction, I am inspired by the ways love, culture, and identity is handled in I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson, Emergency Contact by Mary H.K.Choi, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika Sanchez, Starfish by Akemi Dawn Bowman, and everything by Angie Thomas, Jason Reynolds, Jacqueline Woodson, Katherine Glasgow, Elizabeth Acevedo, and Elana K. Arnold.
The Book Bratz: What do you hope that readers will take away from AMERICAN BETIYA?
Anuradha: I hope my readers might be able to recognize when a relationship begins to feel overly compromising. To embrace and take charge of their own identity despite pressures to fit in, or be the perfect daughter, friend, or first love. And finally, I hope my readers will see that sometimes there are no witnesses to the oppression you might face in your closest relationships, but you can find empowerment to be an upstander for yourself.
The Book Bratz: Do you plan on returning to the world of AMERICAN BETIYA in the future, or do you have any other projects in mind? Can you tell us anything about them?
Anuradha: I am currently in new-story love that has me filled with so much excitement and joy; I’m in that annoying-to-my-family stage of researching and scribbling bits of the story and characters late into the night. It’s a new kind of novel for me, one that is stretching me creatively. I can’t wait until I can share more about it with you. <3
Title: American Betiya
Author: Anuradha D. Rajurkar
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: March 9th, 2021
Summary: Rani Kelkar has never lied to her parents, until she meets Oliver. The same qualities that draw her in--his tattoos, his charisma, his passion for art--make him her mother's worst nightmare. They begin dating in secret, but when Oliver's troubled home life unravels, he starts to ask more of Rani than she knows how to give, desperately trying to fit into her world, no matter how high the cost. When a twist of fate leads Rani from Evanston, Illinois to Pune, India for a summer, she has a reckoning with herself--and what's really brewing beneath the surface of her first love. Winner of the SCBWI Emerging Voices award, Anuradha Rajurkar takes an honest look at the ways cultures can clash in an interracial relationship. Braiding together themes of sexuality, artistic expression, and appropriation, she gives voice to a girl claiming ownership of her identity, one shattered stereotype at a time.
Thank you so much to Anuradha for stopping by and answering our questions! We are super excited about AMERICAN BETIYA and can't wait for it to be out in the world on March 9th!
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