Welcome

Parul Kapur Hinzen was born in Assam, India, where her father worked for the Burmah Oil Company. She took her first plane ride at eleven days old and spent her early childhood between Calcutta, New Delhi and Bombay. Her family immigrated to the United States when she was seven, living briefly in northern New Jersey before settling in Wilton, Connecticut. She received a BA in English Literature from Wesleyan University and an MFA from Columbia University. Returning to India, she worked as a reporter for the city magazine Bombay for a year.

She has been a press officer at the United Nations in New York and a freelance arts and culture journalist during a decade spent in Germany, France, England and Brazil. Her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal Europe,
The New Yorker, New York Newsday, ARTnews and
Art in America. She has published short fiction in Frank, Wascana Review and Allegheny Review. Her first novel, Inside the Mirror, about twin sisters who aspire to become artists in 1950s Bombay, is awaiting publication. She is at work on a second novel about an Indian family in turmoil in America.  

She lives with her husband and son in Atlanta, where she is involved in the arts community and Room to Read, a literacy non-profit building schools in rural communities in Asia. She blogs about books at ArtsCriticATL.com.

 

Inside the Mirror

Inside the Mirror, a debut novel, is the story of twin sisters who dream of becoming artists, a painter and a dancer, in shattered post-Partition India. Not only must the twins battle external restrictions on women’s lives, they must struggle against fierce self-censorship and obstacles they place in their own paths in order to discover who they are.

Please take some time to read the first chapter.

Preview Chapter One (PDF)