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Tania Rachel James (born 1980) is an Indian American novelist. She is known for her works in novels Atlas of Unknowns, Aerogrammes, The Tusk That Did the Damage and Loot. She has also written many short stories.
She likes reading and was inspired to write when she saw how writers "were able to create worlds that seduce a reader and I burned with a desire to do with the readers what the writers had done to me". She enjoyed horror fiction and writers Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Ray Bradbury and Stephen King as a child. She also read books of Malayalam writers M.T. Vasudevan Nair, Paul Zacharia and O.V. Vijayan in English translation. She also stated The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy an "incredible book". At age 16, she aspired to become a writer. Speaking to The Hindu, she said:
She graduated from Harvard University with a BA in filmmaking. She received her Masters of Fine Arts from Columbia's School of the Arts in 2006.
Her second book, Aerogrammes (Knopf), was published in May 2012. She has also written several short stories, "The Other Gandhi" published in Guernica Magazine. "Girl Marries Ghost," a serialized short story in The Louisville Courier-Journal. "Hortense", a short story in Five Chapters.
James's novel, The Tusk That Did the Damage was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2015. It was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and longlisted for the Financial Times Oppenheimer Fund Emerging Voices Award. She taught undergraduate and graduate level fiction at the University of Maryland.
In 2023, Knopf published her book Loot, which begins its tale in India around A.D. 1800. It is a fictional tale about the artists who made Tipu's Sultan Tiger, a famous wooden automaton, shaped as a tiger mauling a European soldier. The work of fiction follows a Mysorean wood carver and a French clockmaker who created the tiger, and follows them long after Tipu Sultan is killed in a battle with the English.
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