Winner, 2023 Governor General's Literary Award
Winner, 2023 Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2+ Emerging Writers
Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction

Genre-blending stories of transformation and belonging that centre women of colour and explore queerness, family, and community.

A couple in a crumbling marriage faces divine intervention. A woman dies in her dreams again and again until she finds salvation in an unexpected source. A teenage misfit discovers a darkness lurking just beyond the borders of her suburban home.

The stories in Chrysalis, Anuja Varghese’s debut collection, are by turns poignant and chilling, blurring the lines between the real world and worlds beyond. Varghese delves fearlessly into complex intersections of family, community, sexuality, and cultural expectation, taking aim at the ways in which racialized women are robbed of power and revelling in the strange and dangerous journeys they undertake to reclaim it.

ANUJA VARGHESE is is a Pushcart-nominated writer whose work appears in Hobart, the Malahat Review, the Fiddlehead, Plenitude Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, So to Speak Journal, Flock Literary Journal, and Corvid Queen: A Journal of Feminist Fairy Tales, among others. Her work has been recognized in the PRISM International Short Fiction Contest, the Pigeon Pages Fiction Contest, and the Alice Munro Festival Short Story Competition. She writes literary fiction, speculative fiction, and erotica/romance — and combinations of all three — where women of colour get leading roles. Her stories appear in the BIPOC gothic anthology When Other People Saw Us, They Saw the Dead and queer horror anthology Queer Little Nightmares. Anuja is a professional grant writer, book reviewer, and fiction editor with The Ex-Puritan Magazine. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario, with her partner, two cats, and two kids. Chrysalis is her first book.

Anuja Varghese's profile page

• Long-listed, Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
• Winner, Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers
• Winner, Governor General's Literary Award in the Fiction Category
• Winner, Hamilton Arts Creator Award
• Commended, CBC 2023 Best Canadian Fiction

The stories in Chrysalis shine as thoughtful, surprising, horrifying, tender portrayals of urgent transformation. Varghese’s dedication to upending expected queer and immigrant narratives, and to spotlighting complexity in relationships is welcome and invigorating.

Xtra

A brisk, beguiling collection.

That Shakespearean Rag

[Varghese’s] raw and poignant writing works beautifully to tell stories of belonging, family, and identity.

White Wall Review

Every piece in Chrysalis is as subtle and punchy as the eponymous final story. Varghese’s women are like her words: brutal, elegant, and resonant.

Quill & Quire

Whether real or fantastical, these stories are bound by women struggling with love and identity amidst their troublesome predicaments.

Wasifiri Magazine

These are stories of the most common people, touched with a sense of weird, of the beyond, of magic.

Hamilton Review of Books

Fantastical, surreal, complex, and often quite sensual. … A powerful punch of stories.

Miramichi Reader