about.
Hi there, I'm Sonia Faleiro, a non-fiction writer in London. I'm a 2022-2024 Royal Literary Fund Fellow and a 2023 Hawthornden Foundation Fellow.
My most recent book is The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing (2021) which was nominated for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the 2022 ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-fiction and the 2024 Premio Inge Feltrinelli Award. It is published by Grove Atlantic, Bloomsbury UK and Bloomsbury Australia, Penguin Random House India and Knopf Canada. It was a New York Times Editor's Choice, a Sunday Times Book of the Year and a Human Rights Watch Book Club pick. It is translated into French, Italian and Polish.
My earlier non-fiction book was Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars, which was nominated for the Lettre Ulysses Award for the art of reportage and named a Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year 2011. It was also a Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, Economist, NPR and Time Out Book of the Year. Beautiful Thing was translated into several languages including Hindi, Swedish, Dutch and French.
Long ago I wrote a novella called The Girl (Penguin, 2006).
My writing has received support from The Royal Literary Fund, The Pulitzer Centre, The Investigative Fund, The Society of Authors Foundation' and K Blundell Trust, the Hawthornden Foundation and the Druscilla Harvey Access Fund.
My writing on politics, crime, tech, and human rights appear in The New York Times, Rest of World, The Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Harper's, Granta, 1843, The California Sunday Magazine, and MIT Technology Review. These are some of my favourites: On the war in Kashmir for Harper's, on India's wrestling superstar for 1843, on the father who rescued his children from child traffickers for Harper's, on the fact checkers taking on Modi's India for Rest of World, and on a sensational murder in India for The California Sunday Magazine.
When I'm not writing I work on a few projects, notably the literary incubator South Asia Speaks which I created in 2020 to support emerging writers in South Asia. I also created Artists for India, an author-led initiative to raise funds during the covid crisis. The initiative raised approximately $30,000 for Mission Oxygen, a non-profit in India. I'm the co-founder of Deca, a global cooperative of award-winning journalists that created longform journalism for digital platforms. In February 2024, I launched #BooksforGaza alongside writer Fatima Bhutto and literary agent Julia Churchill. We assembled a global coalition of writers to donate signed copies of their books, and together raised more than $85,000 for The Ghassan Abu Sittah Children's Fund.
I am represented by Kristina Moore at United Talent Agency.