Shankari Chandran is an Australian Tamil lawyer and author of Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, Song of the Sun God and The Barrier. Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens is short-listed for the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2023. Song of the Sun God was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award (2019) and short-listed for Sri Lanka’s Fairway National Literary Award (2018). The Barrier was short-listed for the Norma K Hemming Award for Speculative Fiction (2018). Song of the Sun God is being adapted for television, starring Bridgerton’s Charithra Chandran (no relation).

Her next novel (untitled) will be published by Ultimo Press in 2024. Her unpublished manuscript, a political thriller called Unfinished Business, will be published as an Audible Original in 2024, and is the first in her Ellie Harper thriller series.

Her short stories have been published in the critically acclaimed anthologies, Another Australia and Sweatshop Women (Vol 2) by Affirm Press/Sweatshop and she is the deputy chair of Writing NSW. She is particularly grateful for generous grants from the Blake-Beckett Scholarship Trust, Create NSW and the Australia Council for the Arts that have supported her to write.

Shankari has spent two decades working as a lawyer in the social justice field, on national and international program design and delivery. She continues her work in social impact for an Australian national retailer. She is based in Sydney, Australia, where she lives with her husband and her four children and explores dispossession and the creation of community through her fiction.