- Lived:
- born 29 March 1959 in Kohima, Nagaland; since 2005 she has lived and written in Tromsø, in Arctic Norway — living, as of September 2026
- Field:
- literature — novelist and poet; widely described as the writer who gave the Naga peoples their first written literature in English
- The Big Idea:
- A people can carry their entire history, law and imagination in the spoken voice for thousands of years — and one writer, in one lifetime, can carry it onto the page before the voice falls silent, so the rest of the world no longer has an excuse not to listen.
- In their words:
- "Everything had to be viewed through the prism of darkness." — on writing Spirit Nights (as of September 2026)
- If you remember one thing:
- The first Naga novel in English appeared in 2003, written by a woman from Kohima who now works above the Arctic Circle — and in the twenty years since, she has written her people's wars, famines and spirits into books that won India's highest literary honours, forcing a country to begin reading a history it had mostly declined to open.