Shobhita Narayan is a writer, marketer, and artist from India. Her fantasy debut for children, Midaash and Maitreyi’s Magical Mayhem, won the Best Author Award 2025 by PVLF. Her short fiction has been published in Bangalore Literature Review, Tasavvur, and Westland Books’ speculative fiction anthology Between Worlds.

Shobhita’s story ‘The Moon As Old As Time’—a lore of love and remorse behind the lunar eclipse—features in THE BARE BONES BOOK OF SPECULATIVE FICTION.

The anthology’s editor Tejaswinee Roychowdhury interviewed her to find out about her literary influences.

How do you perceive speculative fiction vis-à-vis the world around you?

I see speculative fiction as an endless canvas of possibilities and as a writer, I itch to explore it on paper. In this genre, I twist and turn the everyday and mundane into stories and issues that bother me immensely (and at times make me feel powerless) into a lot more. We live and work in a world where words are inexpensive and endless but not altogether ineffective. Perhaps that is the hope I have with writing SFF… A world that you can sometimes escape into and sometimes another that makes you pause and think.

Who and/or what are some of your influences while writing speculative fiction?

I write across genres, so my influences tend to be all over the place. Right now, I have been inching a lot more towards cosy and children’s fantasy than others, given everything that is happening around, so I would say it is Sir Terry Pratchett, Jonathan Stroud, Kelly Barnhill, TJ Klune, and Axie Oh. Closer home, I have enjoyed the works of Manjula Padmanabhan, Archita Mittra, and Indra Das in the last few years.

I am huge on anime and always tend to like a story done well. Frieren is something that I am watching and loving, and also taking notes on. I thought 1899 was well done and enjoyed how the story was presented on screen.

Tell us about the creative process behind your story.

My story was actually a two-part piece I wrote about a decade ago: a short myth and a short science fiction tale that blended into each other. I distinctly remember thinking about mythical tales about the origins of (a) people and how they would tell their myths of their ancestors, but somehow, something about my story back then felt empty. I rewrote the whole story multiple times, and it reached the folkloric fantasy form that was perfect for it.