He found his niche as an English student. “I took my classes and loved meeting people, and I made many close friends at F&M.” “I was a good student and handled social and academic life pretty easily,” he says. Movies and television exposed the brothers to American culture and provided them with a strong impression of American colleges.

On the other, he easily mixed with our students – his successors – and took a real interest in them and their life and work at F&M.”ĭas followed in his brother’s footsteps in attending F&M. “On the one hand, he quickly bonded with the four other Emerging Writers and seemed at home in their company. “It was wonderful, a real homecoming, to have him back on campus for EWF, and he couldn’t have been more gracious, or, I think, more tickled,” says Jeff Steinbrink, Alumni Professor of English Literature and Belles Lettres. It also was a treat for his former professors. “I was swimming around in a sea of nostalgia. He loved the experience of coming back to the place where he began writing. He is quick to credit his F&M professors for being instrumental in the development of the novel and his career as a writer. The Devourers has been nominated for the 2016 Crawford Award and is a finalist for a 2017 Lambda Literary Award. It was also wonderful to see how many students from other majors were there.”ĭas’ work has appeared in several publications, including Clarkesworld Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Strange Horizons and Tor.com, and it also has been widely anthologized in collections such as The Year's Best Science Fiction (St. This time, he had a larger audience than when he performed at the Green Room many years earlier dozens of professors and students were on hand to welcome the first F&M alumnus to be featured in the EWF. The Washington Post calls it one of the best books of the year.ĭas, who currently lives in his hometown of Kolkata, India, returned to campus in April as a participant in the Emerging Writers Festival (EWF), an annual event organized by the Department of English and Philadelphia Alumni Writers House that showcases talented and promising writers. Das describes the book as cross-genre, most closely aligning with contemporary and mythic fantasy. The story became the opening chapter of his first novel, “The Devourers,” published last year by Del Rey Books. His piece won the College’s Jerome Irving Bank Memorial Short Story Prize, and he read it aloud at the Philadelphia Alumni Writers House. When he was a student at F&M, Das wrote a short story as part of that creative writing class. This spring, it has come full circle for Indrapramit (Indra) Das ’08. It started a decade ago in a fiction workshop taught by F&M Professor of English Nicholas Montemarano.

The devourers by indra das