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Portrait photo of author, illustrator, artist for Mitu Malhotra

Very Short Bio:

Mitu Malhotra lives in a treehouse where she weaves fictional yarns out of moonbeams and paints pictures with her pen.

Bio:

Mitu Malhotra holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the 2021 winner of the Katherine Paterson Prize for Literature for Young Adults and Children. In previous avatars, she was a textile and fashion designer.

 

Mitu studied textile design at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and then received a degree in fashion from the National Institute of Fashion Technology in New Delhi. She has taught fashion illustration in India, the Middle East and the US. Now she is an active member of SCBWI and CBIG—Children’s Book Illustrators Group NYC.

 

Besides writing and drawing, Mitu finds joy in turning scraps into sewing projects and building miniature dollhouses out of recycled materials. She currently interns with Cynthia Leitich Smith (author-curator of Heartdrum, a Native-focused imprint of HarperCollins) and interviews authors for the blog Cynsations. 

Random Facts:​

·       Once upon a time, Mitu built a patchwork bike from found bicycle parts. She has cycled along Lake Champlain in Vermont wearing a helmet (recommended). She has cycled alongside cows, camel carts, rickshaws and trucks in India without wearing a helmet (not recommended).

·       At age thirteen Mitu hiked on the Ayu-Dag mountain in Crimea. At seventeen she trekked in the Himalayas to the glacial source of the river Beas.

·       Mitu likes to read history books, picture books, newspapers, instruction manuals, dictionaries, thesauruses or thesauri, magazines, comics, poetry, brochures, catalogs, letters, emails, atlases, recipes, labels…Mitu loves to read.

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