WHO IS MONICA?

Monica Pradhan’s parents emigrated from Mumbai, India, to the United States in the 1960s after her father won a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania for his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. Monica was born in Pittsburgh, grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, and currently lives in Minneapolis and Toronto with her husband. (The two have also lived in New York, Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia, and Michigan.)

Monica credits Nancy Drew books, discovered early in elementary school, for her love of novels and desire to write. As a teen at Langley High School, she was Editor-in-Chief of the school newspaper, The Saxon Scope, and was admitted to Syracuse University as a dual major in journalism and business. Quickly, however, Monica discovered she had neither the talent nor the desire to write on demand and dropped journalism. Though she went on to earn a B.S. in Managerial Law & Public Policy from Syracuse University and an M.B.A. in Finance from the University of Cincinnati, the writing bug never died.

In her twenties, while working as a brokerage representative for Fidelity Investments, then later as a management consultant for Deloitte & Touche Consulting Group, Monica wrote on weekends and in the mornings before work. With her husband’s unwavering support, she was ecstatic to trade in her jet-set business career and power suits for the two-second commute and pajamas dress code of a novelist, her lifelong dream.

Over the course of thirty-plus years, Monica’s family visited India only a handful of times. Then in 1998, after recovering from a near-fatal injury, her mother journeyed solo to study yoga and ended up choosing to retire there, bringing Monica’s heritage from her past to her present. For four years, Monica traveled between Minneapolis and Mumbai, creating the world of The Hindi-Bindi Club. She is currently working hard on her next project, a tie-in novel.