Kanya D’Almeida

Kanya D’Almeida is a Sri Lankan writer. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Jaggery and The Bangalore Review. She is the recipient of the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and her flash fiction is anthologized in Best Small Fictions (Sonder Press, 2021). She received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her essays and nonfiction have appeared on The Margins, Al Jazeera and Truthout, among others. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories.

Her latest book, I Am Maroon: The True Story of An American Political Prisoner (Basic, 2024), is a cinematic memoir of justice and redemption that traces a former Black Panther’s tumultuous life from gang member to Black liberation leader.