“I think bad writing is essential,” Avni Doshi told The Rumpus. “Bad writing is the most important thing for learning how to write.” It took eight drafts before Doshi felt ready to publish her debut novel, Burnt Sugar, but the revisions paid off: the book landed on the 2020 Booker Prize shortlist. Built around a knotty mother-daughter relationship in Pune, India, the book has earned plaudits for Doshi’s refusal to sugarcoat her protagonist, making her challenging to like. "I wanted to push boundaries," she has said. "If that ends up feeling destabilizing for the reader, that’s okay." Born in New Jersey, Avni Doshi moved to India, after completing an MA in London, to curate, and write about, South Asian contemporary art. It was there in 2012 that she wrote what would become the first draft of Burnt Sugar, winning the Tibor Jones South Asia prize for an unpublished manuscript and, with it, an agent. Check out draft number 8, which has just been published stateside by The Overlook Press, available here. Below are Avni Doshi's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

Avni Doshi'S FAVORITE BOOKS

Watching Chinese tanks crush democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 was something of a baptism of fire for the young Samantha Power, who switched her focus from sports journalism to foreign affairs as a result. A few years later found herself in Bosnia as a 23-year old freelancer watching in horror as the international community failed to figure out a response to the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims (she once ran the Boston marathon wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: “Remember Srebrenica – 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys murdered”). Recognizing the limitations of journalism, she enrolled at Harvard Law School with the vague idea that she would find a path to the Hague to prosecute war criminals. Instead she wrote a Pulitzer-winning book, A Problem from Hell, charting the failures of successive U.S. administrations to respond adequately to genocide such as the one in Rwanda. From there it was a short hop from being hired as a foreign policy consultant by the young Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, to her elevation to US ambassador to the United Nations. In her new memoir, The Education of an Idealist (published in paperback on January 26) she goes on the record with her deep frustration at the Obama administration’s failure to intervene in Syria after UN inspectors confirmed the use of sarin gas by President Bashar al-Assad. She also writes about failing to persuade the administration to recognize the 1915 massacre of Armenians as a genocide. In January 2021, her rigorous commitment to human rights was rewarded by Joe Biden, who announced Power as his nomination to head the U.S. Agency for International Development. Below are Samantha Power's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

Samantha Power'S FAVORITE BOOKS

Misty Copeland, perhaps one of the most iconic ballerinas of all time, didn’t start dancing until she was 13, ancient in ballet terms. Growing up among difficult circumstances in California -- her life story captured in her 2017 memoir Life In Motion -- Copeland didn’t see too many faces like hers among the ranks of the corps de ballet. Nevertheless, she persisted and in 2015 was named the first African-American principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater. “My entire career has been devoted to inclusion, making all people feel welcome in spaces like ballet that hadn't felt open or promising to them in the past,” she says. To that end, in 2020, she turned her story into a children’s book, the New York Times best-selling Bunheads. Along the way, Copeland steeped herself in the world of children’s literature.“Each of these books speaks to the spirit of inclusion and the celebration of diversity, told through the lenses of truly dynamic characters and voices. I hope that as you delve into each book's pages, you'll come away with a renewed appreciation for the humanity in us all." Below are Misty Copeland's favorite children's books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

Misty Copeland'S FAVORITE BOOKS

Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Maaza Mengiste is a novelist and essayist. She is the author of the Booker shortlisted-novel, The Shadow King, set during Italys' invasion of Ethiopia. Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, was selected by The Guardian as one of the ten best contemporary African books, and her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Granta, among other journals. She is also the editor of Addis Ababa Noir (Akashic Books), which features short stories from Ethiopian writers around the world. "When I was young, all of Ethiopian history came to me through oral storytelling," she told Washington Square Review. "I understood the country through the voices of people that I knew." Thanks to Mengiste's work, that history might now find the wider audience it deserves. Below are Maaza Mengiste's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

Maaza Mengiste'S FAVORITE BOOKS

“The stories I want to tell are Zimbabwean stories,” the novelist and film-maker Tsitsi Dangarembga told The Independent newspaper in a recent interview. “I do find myself committed to the traumas and the struggles and the possibilities that people have here. And it makes me think about how I would waste my life if I went somewhere where I had no relevance.” Nominated for this year’s Booker Prize for her novel, This Mournable Body, Dangarembga has never been more relevant, situated at the center of a compelling, urgent cultural movement of African artists centering Africa in their work, and frequently paying the price for it. In July, just days after finding out she was on the Booker longlist, Dangarembga was arrested in Harare as part of a crackdown on anti-corruption demonstrations, sparking calls for her release from writers including Kazuo Ishiguro, Carol Ann Duffy, and Philippe Sands, the president of English PEN. The daughter of teachers at a mission school, Dangarembga spent much of her childhood in Britain, before returning to newly-independent Zimbabwe to study psychology. It was there she began to write her debut novel, Nervous Conditions, set in 1960s and ‘70s Rhodesia, eventually submitting it to The Women’s Press, the pioneering British publishing house that had published Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Nervous Conditions would go on to win the 1990 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and was named by the BBC in 2018 as one of the 100 books which have shaped the world. The Mournable Body reunites readers with Tambudzai, the central character of Nervous Conditions and its 2006 sequel, The Book of Not, only older now, her circumstances much reduced, an embodiment of the souring of Zimbabwe’s post-colonial optimism.  Below are Tsitsi Dangarembga 's favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

Tsitsi Dangarembga'S FAVORITE BOOKS