Diane Mehta was born in Frankfurt and raised in Bombay and New Jersey by Jewish and Jain parents. She writes in three genres and reports for national and international publications. Recent essays are in Southern Humanities Review, The Common, and Longreads. A new essay was shortlisted for the Chatauqua prize and another essay was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has been nominated to be a 2021 fellow at the prestigious Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy. She was also a New York Public Library fellow and was granted space and time to use their archives to research Partitions in India and in British-mandated Palestine for a novel set in 1946 India. Her poetry collection Forest with Castanets was published by Four Way Books in 2019. Other recent news: poems in The New Yorker and The American Poetry Review, and a poem commissioned by the NYC Ballet on Christopher Wheeldon’s DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse, She has been an editor at PEN America’s Glossolalia, Guernica, and A Public Space.

In Happier Far, Diane takes us on a funny and engrossing tour of the absurdities and dilemmas of becoming a writer, and how family can sometimes help us and sometimes get in the way. From a vibrant childhood in India to her youth in an unwelcoming New Jersey suburb, from the confusions of marriage and divorce to life as a single parent, she chronicles her search for a family history that can help explain who she is and what matters most to her now.
Some of my personal favorites are the letter to a turtle, learning to swim and get fit despite chronic pain, and the essay about her mother and Beethoven’s last sonata.
Diane has had various new achievements in the last couple of years, including publishing her book of poetry Tiny Extravaganzas in 2023, and being named poet in residence at a chamber ballet in Brooklyn. Her recent poem about a dancer is in The New Yorker, and her essay on Dante’s and Virgil’s friendship (Harvard Divinity Bulletin, 2024) has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.