Shilpi Suneja’s mother in Goa on her honeymoon.

Shilpi Suneja’s debut novel House of Caravans is filled with life and intrigue as one family navigates post-Partition India and the many complicated dynamics that are left in the wake of political turmoil. Suneja shared with Milkweed Staff the personal stories that inspired the novel as well as the importance of Partition novels to the American literary dialectic.

Milkweed Staff (MS): The family in House of Caravans in so many ways is a microcosmic embodiment of many of the larger political and cultural tensions that have divided many post-Partition. Why write about a family when exploring these tensions?

Shilpi Suneja (SS)…

Milkweed Editions is thrilled to announce that Caroline Harper New has won the 2023 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. This is the final year that Milkweed will award the prize. New has won for her poetry collection A History of Half-Birds, selected by Maggie Smith. She will receive $10,000 and publication by Milkweed Editions in January 2024.

Caroline Harper New is a poet and artist from southern Georgia with a background in anthropology. Her work includes ecopoetic short films, painting exhibitions, children’s book illustrations, and ethnographic research in Madagascar. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American…

Milkweed Staff (MS): In your first book, Thin Places, you write about being born during the height of the Troubles in Ireland. In that book, you asked readers to reclaim our landscape through language and to remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map. In Cacophony of Bone, you write about another time of great upheaval and trauma: the global pandemic of 2020. How do you connect these two books in your mind?

Kerri ní Dochartaigh (KnD): When I first spoke to my British editor after acquisition, he told me…