Launch | Cities in Fiction: A Database of Literary Landscapes

Have you ever come across fiction set in Indian cities? How many were set in your city, town, or village? 

Cities in Fiction is a digital archive to locate real-world places in literature. The project aims to enable readers, writers, researchers, scholars, educators, and curriculum builders—across disciplines—to think about their interest in South Asia, particularly in Indian cities, through fiction.

It is a mammoth task to categorise Indian literature to begin with, and one needs a lot of resources to picture anything close to a map of the literary landscape of India. But each one of us has our own individual maps from what we read, and that is a good place to start. If these individual maps are combined to build a database and other resources, it could lead to new knowledge production and ways in which we learn and educate ourselves.

Come join us for a literary evening with educator Vijeta Kumar and author Rheea Mukherjee in conversation with Apoorva Saini, co-founder of Cities in Fiction, where we will explore stories set at this intersection of places and literature; reading in and beyond the classroom; the act of writing, Indian fiction in translation, and help us map your cities, towns and villages on the literary landscape of India.

This will be followed by an interactive Q&A with the audience.

Here are the details:

Date: 13th September 2026, Sunday

Time: 06:00 PM (seating begins at 5:45 PM)

Venue: Champaca Bookstore, Vasanth Nagar

RSVP here to register.

Meet the speakers:

Rheea Mukherjee is the author of Liar, Liar (HarperCollins India, 2026); The Body Myth (Unnamed Press & Penguin India, 2019), which was shortlisted for the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award, and The Girl Who Kept Falling in Love (Penguin India, 2023). Her books linger where desire, disillusionment and rebellion collide, charting the brutal, tender and often ridiculous ways we try to love, grieve and make sense of ourselves. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, Scroll and Southern Humanities Review.

Raised between India and the US, Rheea writes from the uneasy intersections of place, memory and cultural expectation. Her diasporic lens is sharp, unsentimental and alive to the contradictions of Indian urban life while casting a critical glance at the brittle promises of the American Dream.

She currently co-runs Moonbird Creative, a creative communications studio in Bangalore. Rheea’s public work focuses on mental health, justice and the small, stubborn rebellions that keep us human. You can follow her at @rheealization, where the stories continue, unfinished, curious and chaotic.

Vijeta Kumar teaches Communicative English and Creative Writing at St. Joseph's University, and writes at rumlolarum.com. 

Apoorva Saini is the co-founder of Cities in Fiction, a digital public archive for locating real-world places in South Asian literature. She also runs The Bilingual Window, an online lit mag for original and translated short stories. Apoorva has studied creative writing from University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Ambedkar University, Delhi.

RSVP to reserve your spot.