Mansi Choksi is a journalist who writes about the intersection of gender, crime, opportunity and pop-culture. Her first book, The Newlyweds, about love and crime in India, was published to rave
reviews in 2022. The Times London called it "a staggeringly good work of literary journalism" and The Financial Times said it was "a compelling and sometimes heartbreaking book."
Her writing has appeared in print and online at Harper’s, The New York Times, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Slate and The Atlantic. She was the cohost an NPR podcast called Love Commandos which aired as the final season of Rough Translation in 2023.
Her long-form story, The Newlyweds, about love and crime in India, won the Overseas Press Club of America’s 2019 Madeline Dane Ross Award. It was also a 2018 finalist for the Livingston Award in International Reporting. A Chance to Rewrite History, a story about women fighters of the Tamil Tigers which she cowrote with Kim Wall, was a 2019 finalist for the Livingston Award in International Reporting. Champ of the Labor Camp, a story about a singing competition in Dubai’s labor camps, was a 2016 finalist for the South Asian Journalists Association’s Outstanding Arts and Culture Reporting Award. In 2014, she won the same prize for Toppling a Delicate World, a story about sexuality and culture.
In 2018, she won New York University's Reporting Award to explore Hindu nationalism. In 2016, she was named an inaugural fellow of the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Reporting Grant for Women’s Stories to write about women in post-conflict Sri Lanka.
She previously received two African Great Lakes Fellowships from the IWMF to explore counter-narratives in Uganda, and completed two courses in hostile environment training and first-aid.
In 2013, she graduated with honors from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York, which she attended as a Fulbright-Nehru Master’s Scholar. At college, she was also named a Delacorte Fellow, an Ed Gold Scholar and winner of the Lars-Erik Nelson Prize for national affairs reporting. Previously, she reported for the Times of India.
She was born in Mumbai, India, and lives in Dubai, The United Arab Emirates. She is represented by Jin Auh of the Wylie Agency.
Photo by Adam Perez.