Padma’s debut novel, The Toss of a Lemon, was published in eight countries, a bestseller in three, and a finalist for the Commonwealth (Regional) First Book Prize, the Amazon.ca First Novel Prize and the Pen Center USA Fiction Prize. Her second novel, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, was published in Canada, the USA, India and Australia. In Canada, it was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a national bestseller. In 2020, the New York Review Books published her first book-length translation from Brazilian Portuguese, the novel São Bernardo, by the late, lauded Brazilian novelist Graciliano Ramos, in their Classics series. It was runner-up for the UK Society of Authors’ TA First Translation Prize and shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Padma’s next book was Like Every Form of Love: A Memoir of Friendship and True Crime, followed in 2024 by another translation, the book-length essay Where We Stand, by Brazilian public intellectual Djamila Ribeiro, and a hybrid novel, The Charterhouse of Padma. Her latest book is another translation, On Earth As It Is Beneath, a contemporary horror story by Brazilian Ana Paula Maia.
In 2026, look for a reissue by Godine of Padma’s first novel The Toss of a Lemon, another Ana Paula Maia translation, and The Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories, which Padma is co-editing with translator Daniel Hahn.
Padma’s short fiction has been published in such venues as Granta and The Boston Review. She’s also published personal essays, reviews, cultural journalism and short translations, and has several produced plays. She is the grateful recipient of grants from the US National Endowment for the Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts and many others, as well as fellowships at artists’ residencies such as Sacatar Brazil and the MacDowell Colony.
Professor of fiction-writing, translation and international literature in the Programs in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas–Fayetteville, she has served on juries for literary awards in Canada and the US, including the Governor General’s Award, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Neustadt Prize, the ASV Armory Square Prize for South Asian Fiction in Translation and others. She has additionally been guest faculty in fiction and translation for the Banff Center, the Vermont Studio Center, Kundiman, the Bread Loaf Conferences, and elsewhere.
Graduate courses she has developed for the University of Arkansas include Research-based Fiction, Historical Fiction, The Boundaries of Nonfiction, Adventures in the First Person, Through the Mirror: Doubles in Fiction, and surveys of Brazilian, South Asian and Canadian novels. Her honors undergraduate courses have included “Shedunnit! Women Criminals in Life and Literature” and “Can Good Books Make Us Better People? Our search, in stories, for how to be.” In all her courses, she emphasizes the lifelong process of learning to read like a writer, which she is still–always–trying to do.
Founding Director of the Arkansas International Writer-at-Risk Residency Fellowship, a program that is currently dormant, she remains actively committed to freedom of expression and international literature.
Canadian by birth and temperament, she now lives on a hilltop in Arkansas with the poet and translator Geoffrey Brock, their kids, and a rotating cast of parents and pets.