Vauhini Vara is a writer and editor in Colorado.

She began her journalism career as a technology reporter at the Wall Street Journal and later launched, edited and wrote for the business section of the New Yorker’s website. Since then, she has also both written and edited for The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic. She writes for other publications as well, including Businessweek, where she is a contributing writer. Her journalism has been honored by the Asian American Journalists Association, the International Center for Journalists, the McGraw Center for Business Journalism, and others.

Her latest book is Searches (Pantheon, 2025), a work of journalism and memoir about how big technology companies are exploiting human communication — and how we’re complicit in this. (The book includes a dialogue she had with ChatGPT, which you can learn more about in this Guardian piece she wrote about it.) Esquire named it one of the best books of the year, Anne Helen Petersen called it “the best book I’ve read this year” in her Culture Study newsletter, and it was a Belletrist Book Club pick. Her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao (Norton, 2022), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and won the Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize and the Colorado Book Award. Her story collection, This is Salvaged (Norton, 2023), was longlisted for The Story Prize and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and won the Kalinga Literary Festival Book Award and the High Plains Book Award. For her body of work, she has been longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Award.

Vara is also the author of a play, Ghost Variations — a stage adaptation of her viral essay “Ghosts” — which was selected to be performed as part of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’s 2024 Colorado New Play Summit.

She is a mentor at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project, where six of her mentees have books published or forthcoming with major presses. To learn about mentorship, visit the Book Project’s website; you can read about Vara’s mentees here.

Vara was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, to Indian immigrants, and grew up there and in suburbs of Oklahoma City and Seattle. She later lived in New York and San Francisco and now resides in Colorado with her husband, the writer Andrew Altschul, and their son.