Vauhini Vara is a writer and editor in Colorado.

NOTE: Short versions of this bio can be found here and are likeliest to be up-to-date. The long — and potentially slightly outdated — version follows.

She began her 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 has worked as a contributing writer; her most recent feature, published in March 2026, is a profile of the bestselling author James Patterson. Her journalism (which can be found here) has been honored and supported by the Asian American Journalists Association, the International Center for Journalists, the McGraw Center for Business Journalism, the Omidyar Network and others.

Her latest book is the Belletrist Book Club pick Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon, 2025), a work of nonfiction investigating and enacting the cognitive dissonance of living with big tech companies’ products: Even as we use them on our own terms — for empowerment, understanding, communion — we also participate in our own exploitation and that of our environment. It won the Porchlight Business Book Award and was shortlisted for the Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize and the Kalinga Literary Festival Book Award.

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, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and it won the Colorado Book Award, the Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize and the Times of India-JK Paper AutHer Award. Her story collection, This is Salvaged (Norton, 2023), was longlisted for the Story Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and the Joyce Carol Oates Award and won the High Plains Book Award and the Kalinga Literary Festival Book 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.

Vara has spoken regularly about AI, technology, and human communication and selfhood, including at universities such as Stanford, Princeton, the University of Texas, and the Ohio State University, as well as for organizations including the Chautauqua Institution, the New York State Writers Institute, and the American Library Association.

She is the director of Look2Justice’s Free Thinkers Book Fellowship, supporting the incarcerated writers and leaders Christopher Blackwell, Antoine Davis, and Kwaneta Harris in completing nonfiction books informed by their expertise and experience in the American criminal justice system. She is also a mentor at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project, where six of her mentees have books published or forthcoming with major presses. The published books include: The Tragedy of True Crime by John J. Lennon (Celadon, 2025); How to Winter by Kari Leibowitz (Penguin Life, 2024); No Choice by Becca Andrews (Public Affairs, 2022); and The Good Enough Job by Simone Stolzoff (Portfolio, 2023). Books from Angelique Stevens and Anna Kodé are forthcoming. To learn about mentorship, you can visit the websites of Look2Justice’s The Bridge and Lighthouse’s Book Project. You can also read about her mentees’ books 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.