Kiran Kaur Saini writes fiction, plays and film scripts. Her short stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Pleiades, and other literary journals. Plays have been produced by Dream Weaver Productions and Theatre Group, Inc. in New York City, and at Le Chat Noir in New Orleans. Among her produced films, “The Lesson,” directed by her sister Indy K. Saini, won best feature at the Miami International Women’s Film Festival.
Kiran was a quarter-finalist for the Chesterfield Film Award, has received a Pushcart Prize nomination from Joyce Carol Oates, and has been awarded the Transatlantic Review Award for Fiction (“The Henfield Prize”).
She has received awards from the North Carolina Council of the Arts, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and recently served on the judging panel for the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards for playwrights and screenwriters.
Raised in a small town in Pennsylvania by a Sikh Punjabi father and a blue-eyed mom from North Carolina, Kiran graduated from Smith College with a degree in music (piano performance and composition), and a minor in Russian Literature. She earned her MFA in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College and has taught creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Since Hurricane Katrina, Kiran has been a film industry professional and educator in Los Angeles.
Kiran also does a little drawing and painting in ink, watercolor, gouache, and oil. You can follow some of that work on Instagram.