Andaleeb Wajid Profile

My fondest memories are of my father sitting on a cane chair, shawl around his shoulders, telling us absurd and fantastic stories. We never found the book he read those from because he made it all up. My love of stories comes from him and I hope to enamour other children with the magic of words. Andaleeb Wajid

Profile

Andaleeb Wajid lives in Bangalore and has published 13 novels in the past 8 years.

Andaleeb Wajid is truly prolific by any standards. The Hindu had shortlisted her book ‘When She Went Away’ for the Young World Good Books Award in 2017. She combines the diverse elements of romance and horror in her books and has been published by Penguin, Random House, Speaking Tiger and Juggernaut.

Andaleeb writes when her sons have left for school or college and takes small breaks in between. When she finished her 10th book, in 2013, she decided not to write for a year till all her books were published. But she was worried because she had heard a contemporary writer say that writing is like a muscle… ‘if you don’t use it you lose it’. She even took up a job in that break period as head of marketing in a software company.

She believes that the one-year hiatus recharged her batteries and helped her become even more prolific. She makes extensive notes, in a random manner in new notebooks and refers to them while writing. Sometimes she even works on two books at a time, dividing her time equally, but generally believes in writing one book at a time. Five of her books are out, or will be, in 2018 and she is already skimming her mind for ideas for books to be written in 2019!