Sonia Faleiro Biography and latest books by Sonia Faleiro

An award-winning Indian reporter and writer, Sonia Faleiro was born in Goa. She grew up in New Delhi where she studied History at St. Stephen\'s College, and went on to pursuing her master’s degree from the University of Edinburgh. Staying away from home, her melancholy reflected in her first book, The Girl that went on to becoming a bestseller.

 Her second book, Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay\'s Dance Bars is a work of narrative non-fiction, based on the extensive research she did on Bombay\'s dance bars.

Beautiful Thing has been described as \'brilliant and unforgettable, a book by a writer who is one of the best of her generation\'. It was Time Out magazine\'s Subcontinental Book of the Year, 2010 and CNN\'s Mumbai Book of the Year. Beautiful Thing is being translated into several languages and would be published in Australia, UK, and USA.

A recipient of a CNN Young Journalist Award (2006), as well as of awards from the Ratan Tata Trust, the Oxford Cambridge Society of India, and the British Council\'s D\'Souza Trust, Sonia has reported for India Today and Tehelka magazines, and is currently a contributing editor to Vogue (India). Her reportage includes numerous reports on India\'s sex-workers, on Bombay\'s bar dancers, a six-part series on India\'s domestic workers, and extensive writings on the suicides of farmers in Vidarbha.

Sonia Faleiro has contributed to several anthologies, viz. AIDS Sutra: Hidden Stories from India; First Proof; The Fiction Collection; Reflected in Water: Writings on Goa. She now lives in San Francisco.

Her works

The Girl

The Girl is the story of an anonymous girl (referred to as simply “the Girl” throughout the novel) from a sleepy village named Azul in Goa. On a December evening she is found dead and no one in Azul is really surprised by the mysterious murder. But two men who knew and loved her are curious to discover what made her give up her life. As they read the pages of her diary, the story of The Girl unravels. While she is coming to terms with her life and unhappy childhood, she meets a backpacker and loses her heart to him. However, their life together does not last, and she languishes with unrequited love and decides to end her misery. After her death the lost lover returns, consumed with guilt, to live in her house. The novel is brief, but full of character, and succeeds in recording the descriptions of Goa, its people, along with their mannerisms and attitudes.

Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay\'s Dance Bars is a work of non-fiction, based on five years of research in Bombay\'s dance bars. It is the story of Leela at a dance bar in South Bombay. Says Falerio, “Although several bar dancers were present, she immediately grabbed my attention. She was an electric spark with a great sense of humour and enviable self-confidence. I had some idea of the background most bar dancers came from and so I knew it was very likely Leela had suffered poverty, that she had possibly been abused and perhaps been forced into the dance bar by avaricious family members. That she was, despite that, genuinely happy and optimistic and was clearly enjoying her life intrigued me. I hadn’t and in fact wouldn’t meet another bar dancer like her. And yes, while it’s true that more often than not bar dancers emerge from similar situations of deprivation it is what Leela strove to make of her life that marked her as different. I always knew I would write about Leela, but it was the ban against bar dancing that was proposed that put her story in context.”



(Sonia Faleiro\'s pic by Ulrik McKnight)